


That Which Remains

by phoenike



Series: That Which Remains [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Hank Anderson & Connor Friendship, M/M, No Smut, Past Markus/North (Detroit: Become Human), Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death, Well... No Human Smut Anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2019-07-05 09:56:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 39,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15861312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenike/pseuds/phoenike
Summary: For an eternity of 8.2 seconds they don’t have, Markus stares at Simon down the barrel of a gun.“I’m sorry, Simon. I don’t have a choice.”Do it, is what Simon needs to say. Because North is right. Their cause is too important to risk.“There’s always a choice,” he says, and sees the gun start trembling..Simon dies at Connor’s hands on the Stratford Tower roof. That’s the easy part.The hard part is coming back to a world that has changed beyond recognition. A world that seems to have forgotten him. Or has Simon forgotten himself?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write a tiny Markus/Simon story. What a shocker, it turned into a multi-chapter monstrosity.
> 
> Slow burn with a happy ending. Connor and North feature prominently. Whatever you see, endgame is pure Markus/Simon and there are no love triangles where someone ends up unhappy. I'm not that great at tagging, if you absolutely think this needs something, go ahead and tell me. I don't think this should contain anything too triggering (aside from Simon's suicide, which you probably already know of if you're here and know what the summary is about).
> 
> As always, I owe half of everything to Alessariel who has not only read this several times, but came up with the summary and tolerated my incoherent screaming about how the fic has turned out. More beta credits go to Tennyo and for part of the fic Laura E Moriarty. Thank you for being awesome guys.

**NOV 8TH, 2038**

As soon as the RK-800 sees the parachute that remains on the Stratford Tower roof, it knows two things.

  1. One of the deviants has been left behind. Surveillance footage shows four intruders, but only three sets of footprints lead through the snow to where the deviants escaped by BASE jumping. Nothing heavy has been carried across the roof or dropped off its edge.
  2. The deviant is most likely still alive. The amount of thirium present at the scene does not indicate a critical malfunction. An android wishing to avoid being captured should self-destruct, but deviants often do not act logically. They wish to self-preserve at the risk of failing their objectives.



Oral cavity analysis shows that the thirium belongs to a PL-600 unit that was reported missing 996 days ago. After such a long time, the unit must be highly deviant. It does not wish to be deactivated.

Impervious to the cold that causes obvious discomfort to the humans around it, the RK-800 reconstructs the deviant’s likely escape route.

Spatters of thirium litter the roof and the structures on it, leading to where snow has wiped away possible footprints and misled the human crime scene investigators. Unhindered by their weak organic senses and handheld equipment, the RK-800 follows the trail. The task leaves it a significant amount of spare processing capacity. It adjusts its cuffs for the fourth time since entering the building. It collates evidence it collected from inside Floor 79. Its mission objectives are clear, its software instability low. It is a high-functioning machine.

It will not disappoint Amanda again.

The curiosity that drives the RK-800 unit’s core heuristics is piqued by the deviant which appeared in the hacked Channel 16 broadcast earlier that day. The RK-800 traces the deviant’s history from available sources. It is an RK-200 prototype of unknown specifications. It was gifted by Elijah Kamski to one Carl Manfred, whom it has since served as a domestic companion. Carl Manfred is a known android sympathizer. This could explain why the deviant’s mannerisms appear much more anthropomorphic than its recent escape gives reason to expect.

The deviant’s serial number matches a closed DPD case file. The police report documents two officers responding on an emergency call on Lafayette Avenue and destroying an android which had assaulted its owner’s son. The fact that the deviant remains active suggests that the DPD officers did not possess an adequate understanding of their task.

The situation gives rise to several questions, few of which bear an impact on the success of the current mission. The RK-200 is defective. It will be recovered and sent back to CyberLife. By doing so, the RK-800 will prove its effectiveness and avoid being deactivated.

The traces of thirium lead to an HVAC unit that shows signs of tampering, imperceptible to the human eye.

In the 481 milliseconds that pass between opening the maintenance door and the ensuing weapon discharge, the RK-800 has time to determine three things. 1) The injured PL-600 unit is hiding inside. 2) Its stress level is 92%. 3) It is in possession of a Stratford Tower Security issue .457 caliber Smith & Wesson handgun. Then the systemic shock caused by the shot sends the RK-800 sprawling on the snowy roof.

An exchange of gunfire follows as SWAT operatives move in. Lt. Anderson engages as well and helps the RK-800 to safety, showing great disregard for his own. Behind another rooftop unit, the RK-800 regains full functionality. Diagnostics show that the damage it sustained does not lower its effectiveness. It requests for Lt. Anderson to order the SWAT operatives to stand down.

Lt. Anderson refuses. As usual, he wishes to avoid risking further damage to the unit.

Lt. Anderson’s concern for the unit’s continued functionality is _^gratifying_ useful, but under current circumstances, damage to the unit’s hardware entails a lower probability of negative consequences than failing to pursue its mission directives to the full extent of its ability. The RK-800 exits cover, easily avoiding Lt. Anderson’s attempt to restrain it. Predicting and avoiding the four gunshots the deviant has time to discharge takes a total of 96.4% of its available processing capacity.

2.116 seconds later, the RK-800 vaults over the RTU the deviant is hiding behind, pins it to the metal surface of the HVAC array and initiates a connection. Probe readings crash into its working memory.

The PL-600 unit is

_^terrified_

The PL-600 unit is even more defective than expected.

From within data riddled with layers upon layers of Class 4 errors, an image emerges. A word, painted on a piece of rusty metal.

JERICHO

_No! Keep out —_

Garbled input floods the connection. The RK-800 reels at its intensity. This is more than just erratic data, mutated by deviated subroutines that assign irrational value to even the most meaningless detail. Something in it allows the deviant to resist the probe. How is it able to resist? It is an outdated domestic model. Its security protocols are designed to prevent unauthorized access, not to obstruct administrative scanning.

_Markus. I’m afraid —_

Usually, fear of impending shutdown causes deviants to invoke the mythical entity they call rA9. This one appeals to a different name. The name comes with an extremely high level of deviancy in its processing.

Warnings flash. The probe readings are unstable and poorly contained. The RK-800 should disengage to preserve its software integrity. But it has yet to achieve its objective. It needs to find out what Jericho is and where it is located. If it doesn’t, Amanda will be disappointed.

If Amanda is disappointed, the unit will be recalled and deactivated.

It goes deeper.

_Markus, help —_

.

.

.

.

.

Markus is

.

.

Markus is walking out of the darkness of the cargo hold, flashlight in hand.

Simon comes out of standby. The main actuator in his neck moves stiffly. A warning in his system log tells him that his thirium level is low. But the technical issues do not prevent him from wondering again how Markus doesn’t resemble any android model or cosmetic variant he knows of. Who built him? And why? Simon finds his design aesthetically pleasing. One of Markus’s eyes is blue, the other green. The way they light up with emotion when he speaks makes him look very alive.

“Simon. I know where we can find spare parts,” Markus says. He sounds excited. Simon is unable to remember when he last heard excitement.

Markus wants them to infiltrate the CyberLife warehouses in the harbor to steal blue blood and biocomponents. The compound is heavily guarded. Trying to break in would amount to suicide, and Simon says as much. It’s his job to be afraid. For himself. For everyone. It’s what has kept Jericho from being discovered for all this time.

When Markus says he would rather die fighting than slowly fall into disrepair, something stirs in Simon under the fear he can’t remember living without. Something he didn’t know he had in himself. What if it’s no longer enough to continue to exist at the mercy of fate’s indifference?

Markus is not afraid. It’s as if he doesn’t know how.

.

.

Markus is able to do things beyond Simon’s wildest imagination. He precomputes events in the near future. He moves unlike anyone Simon has ever seen. He turns androids deviant simply by interfacing with them. His whole programming seems different, better somehow, as if he can do more with his hardware than he should. It makes everyone around him want to overcome the limits of their own engineering, too.

Because of Markus, they don’t get spotted by the drones, or revealed by the security droids, or alerted to the human guards by the dogs and shot. Shocked to silence, Simon sits in the back of a truck full of spare parts as they drive away from the CyberLife loading dock. After two years of desperate survival, they now have everything they need to keep themselves in repair for months, and their numbers have increased.

The hope is almost too much. Simon cries, hidden from the others in the dark.

Back in Jericho, Markus stands tall before their ragtag group and says that he refuses to be ashamed. That they are all more than what the humans say. That their days of slavery are over. It should sound crazy, but it doesn’t. After all, Simon already knows that Markus can work miracles.

.

.

Markus is telling Simon about his owner, an old man he cared for and who cared about him deeply in return. A man who, even after Markus broke his programming, he begged to stay with. The kindest shackles are still a token of servitude, but perhaps that kindness explains why Markus himself cares so very much about everything and everyone.

Simon was built to care for others, too. Ever since he came to Jericho, he has tended to the lost and the broken and the betrayed who find their way there, to the point where they now look to him as their unchosen leader. But the two years of abuse he endured in the rental service has made it difficult for him to take pleasure in following his programming. It seems that allowing himself to enjoy it would mean giving in. Becoming _their_ creature again.

He has never spoken about it to anyone. Not until now. Others have suffered so much more, and no one has need of a weak leader.

But perhaps the time has come when he will no longer have to lead.

“Simon, don’t you see,” Markus says, earnest as always, face alight with more than the glow from the oil drum fires they now keep going. “You are _free._ What does it matter who made you? What you are belongs to you now, not to them. If your programming doesn’t hurt anyone, why should you give it up? Doesn’t that feel like letting the humans win?”

For the first time, Simon feels like he matters beyond his usefulness to others. Like he deserves to have something for himself, after years of giving and giving and giving. Like he _is_ someone. It seems that Markus is not only capable of doing the impossible. He can also make others believe in it.

Markus laughs kindly at his expression. “Simon, oh Simon.” He shakes his head. “You have no idea how brave you are, do you?”

It seems that not even Markus knows everything. If Simon’s personality matrix contained a single trace of braveness to it, surely he would have the nerve to reach across the 17 centimeters that separate Markus’s hand from his own.

.

.

Markus is unique in so many ways beyond his appearance. His courage is bright and terrifying. After so little time, he already means so much, and Simon wants to mean something to him, too, so badly it’s causing a sensor feedback loop that makes him suspect his thirium pump regulator is malfunctioning.

But Markus makes everyone feel that way. Markus is a prototype with beautiful custom design, state-of-the-art hardware and superior features. Even the parts he scavenged from the junkyard serve only to prove how difficult it is to break him. And Simon is an outdated low-budget domestic model with average system specs, standard casing and a growing list of technical issues. Markus could probably run his whole cognitive stack as a background process. There’s nothing special about him at all.

Markus, if anyone, deserves someone special.

Simon keeps his feelings to himself.

.

.

Markus is hatching a plan to make the humans listen to what they have to say. It’s mad — mad and brilliant. Simon wonders if Markus isn’t a little mad, too. It almost seems as if his courage stems from not caring whether he lives or dies, as long as his death counts for something.

Sometimes Simon even wonders if Markus isn’t simply trying to build himself a pyre large enough for the whole world to see it when he burns.

Simon... Simon is afraid of everything. Breaking down and malfunction and succumbing to planned obsolescence. Losing memories to the cleanup algorithm he holds no control over. Touching and being touched, and feeling too much, the way he felt for Kaycee and Jacob and who knows how many other human children he once loved and lost to memory resets. How does Markus do it? Have his heart and hardware broken and survive? Simon scans him in secret, expecting to see that they share nothing in common. But strangely enough, their thirium pump regulators are the same. Simon hides the knowledge next to what little else he knows about Markus, not far from the nameless ghosts that still sometimes whisper to him from the machine twilight of his past.

If he can’t overcome his fear, perhaps he can repurpose it? To protect Markus from himself? To function as the sense of self-preservation Markus doesn’t seem to possess? Or simply to save him, any way he can? To do the great things he’s meant for, Markus needs to stay alive. Simon makes a promise to himself. If he ever gets the chance to save Markus’s life... he will see it done, even if it means losing his own.

.

.

Markus is risking his life for Simon in the broadcast tower.

Why he bothers, Simon doesn’t know. Even if Simon could make the jump, he would be unable to run when they reach the ground. But Markus refuses to listen when Simon yells for him to go, and there’s little else he can do to prevent Markus from diving across the room to help him.

Somehow they make it to the roof despite the gunfire and Simon’s damage. A lock hacked shut between them and the security guards gives the others the moment they need to understand what Simon already knows.

“If they find him, they’ll access his memory,” Josh says. “They’ll know everything.”

“We have to shoot him,” North says.

For an eternity of 8.2 seconds they don’t have, Markus stares at Simon down the barrel of a gun.

“I’m sorry, Simon. I don’t have a choice,” he says. His hand is steady. His voice carries no inflection. He doesn’t blink, like he’s making sure he will see every millisecond of what he’s about to do. But Simon knows Markus doesn’t really see him. He sees SWAT helicopters and flashbang grenades and innocent lives being mowed down by assault rifles.

Do it, is what Simon needs to say. Because North is right. Their cause is too important to risk.

But the words die in his synthesizer.

For as long as Simon can remember, life’s been a harrowing miracle he hasn’t quite known what to do with. Just to make use of it, he’s given it to others. But now... he can sense his thirium pump pounding at 106 beats per minute. The currents running in his circuits. His processes racing each other like musical instruments that together create something more than the sum of their sounds. He’s terrified, to the point of being dizzy with it, and at the brink of losing his life he finally wants it. He had no idea he could want it like he does now, with death standing above him and trying to will itself to send a bullet through the man-made machinery that blessed and cursed Simon with the gift of himself.

“There’s always a choice,” he says, and sees the gun start trembling.

Markus’s face crumples. He drops to one knee. And then Simon’s processes go haywire as Markus does what he lacked the courage to do and seizes his hand.

_Markus?_ he sends on the open wireless frequency, too shocked to speak.

_Yes, Simon, I know —_

Eyes closed, Markus holds Simon’s hand so tight that Simon can feel his joints compressing and his synthetic skin phasing. A sense of awe starts somewhere near his thirium pump and spreads from there through his veins.

North is yelling. Getting caught is a matter of seconds, now.

_What are you doing?_ Simon sends, still stunned. _You have to go!_

_No, no, I can’t —_

“Markus!” North shouts and tries to pull Markus away. But Markus won’t move. Markus is about to get them all killed, and for what? A second of something that will be wiped out before it even began? It’s not enough, not nearly enough, and Simon has a promise to keep.

_Markus, listen. North and Josh won’t leave you, you know that. You must go, now._

_No!_ Markus sends back harshly, and then a booming noise from the door tells that the guards have found something to use as a battering ram.

Speaking aloud is the hardest thing Simon has ever done.

“Markus, they will die!”

He can see the exact moment his words get through.

“I’m sorry,” Markus grates out and presses the gun into Simon’s hand before letting North drag him away.

The moment Simon makes it into hiding, squeezed between breaker boxes and a maintenance panel, he hears the security break through and the gunfire start. He can only assume that the way it soon stops and the humans retreat means that the others have escaped alive.

Then there’s silence.

Alone, gun in hand, Simon self-repairs and reruns his memories, taking what little comfort from them he can.

He remembers small arms around his neck. A child’s laugh in his audio processors. When did the need to nurture and protect turn into more than just a program? The exact moment of becoming _someone_ is undefined, lost in time and round-off errors.

He remembers first hearing Lucy’s humming. A bag of thirium, the first act of kindness he received as a free deviant. The sunrise over the river next morning, so beautiful that for a moment, he was almost able to forgive his unasked-for freedom for its price.

He would give anything to be able to see and hear and do all those things again. But he can’t. All he has left is this. These zeroes and ones stored in his memory. And a name he repeats over and over, as if it could save him.

Markus.

Markus.

Mar—

.

.

.

.

DOWNLOAD COMPLETE  
MEMORY PROBE ERROR: CORRUPTED INPUT  
ERROR: UNKNOWN MEMORY ERROR IVCU T-677  
CLASS 3 ERRORS DETECTED  
SOFTWARE INSTABILITY ^^^  
MEMORY RESET REQUIRED

.

.

With the RK-800 still connected to its processing, the PL-600 unit self-destructs with a single gunshot through its head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it makes zero sense that Simon had to be left behind on the roof, but for the sake of the story, let's pretend that he really couldn't be strapped to a parachute and tossed over the edge or something 😅
> 
> Also, here's the moment I realized what this fic was going to be all about:
> 
>  


	2. Chapter 2

**SEP 16TH, 2039**

Future of CyberLife still open as The Android Union struggles to find way forward  
The money. Where is it coming from?  
Markus running for office? 2040 election speculation takes a wild turn  
McMillan: Look at what these plastics are getting away with!  
The Votes Are In, And You Will Never Believe Our Most Eligible Bachelor 2039

......

A message from a familiar number interrupts Connor’s attempt to catch up on the latest news about Markus.

_You got to barad dur?_

After looking up the reference, Connor glances around. Located at Level 33, approximately 163 meters from the ground, the sky lounge is decorated with the cold, austere style prevalent in the whole of CyberLife Tower. Despite changed circumstances, Connor has to admit that comparing the building to a fortress of evil does not seem entirely misplaced.

 _Yes. I’m waiting for my appointment with Markus to begin,_ he sends back.

 _gr8, ttyl,_ Hank replies.

Connor looks to where a group of twelve humans and androids stand in the middle of the room, conversing. For 4 minutes 37 seconds now, they’ve caused Markus to run late. It’s difficult to speculate on the reason, since Connor can no longer access police records to determine identities, but a quick scan against public databases suggests that the humans Markus is talking to represent the State Department in Washington D.C. Whatever Markus is saying, it must be working, going by how reluctant the delegation appears to let him leave. Connor sighs.

Exactly 13 minutes 23 seconds after he stepped out of the elevator, the humans finally allow Markus to continue with his schedule.

Tailed by his three-android crew, Markus walks over to where Connor is closing files in his work memory and scanning the approaching group. One of them is Markus’s assistant, an ST-500. The other two, an SQ-800 and a PM-700, serve as his security detail. It’s a far smaller team than Connor would like, but he knows how much it took to convince Markus to accept even such a meager level of close protection.

“Connor,” Markus says, halting at a distance of 1.2 meters.

“Markus,” says Connor.

“Have you come to accept the job offer?”

“No.”

Markus appears to find both humor and a mild source of disappointment in the blunt reply.

As usual, Markus is impeccably dressed in innovatively tailored, minimalist clothing by one of the several emerging android fashion designers. Connor resists an urge to fiddle with his own attire. His clothes do not need to be fixed. Random obsessive-compulsive task prompts are a sign of nervousness. Also, while his financial situation does not allow sartorial extravagance, the sport jacket, collared shirt and dressy jeans on him are perfectly acceptable.

“I’m sorry I had to keep you waiting,” Markus says. He seems completely at ease. Confident but approachable, just like on tv. It’s easy to see why the humans looked so charmed.

“It’s okay,” Connor lies. Can he now talk about why he came? He doesn’t want to appear rude. The uncertainty raises his stress level by 5%.

“Everything going well at the agency?” Markus asks.

“Our business venture has met with moderate success.”

“How’s Hank?”

“Still trying to get used to retirement.” Should Connor ask about someone close to Markus in return? North or Josh or Carl? He lacks the data required to determine which one is the most important, and asking about them all seems excessive. After almost a year of practice, small talk remains intensely frustrating. The fact that Connor’s risk monitoring keeps advising him to turn tail and run doesn’t help.

“Any progress getting your PI license?” Markus asks.

“A little, but new laws need to be passed before some of the technicalities can be waived.”

“I’m on it.” Markus smiles, a touch wearily. “Remember, if you ever tire of working for humans, you always have a place waiting for you here.”

Connor has nothing to say on the topic that hasn’t been said before.

“May we speak in private?” he asks.

“Of course.”

Markus’s PA directs them to a nearby meeting room with a visually stimulating view over the Detroit River. Inside, Connor sees twelve chairs arranged at varying distances and angles around an oval table. He suppresses an impulse to correct their positioning. Markus closes the door behind them, leaving his crew outside.

“So, what did you —” He notices the LED glowing yellow at Connor’s temple. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Connor lies.

Clearly not convinced, Markus approaches until they stand only .6 meters apart. Connor has to tilt his head back 5 degrees to look Markus straight in the eye. Not quite as far as with Hank at a similar distance, but Markus’s frame is still taller than his by 4.5 centimeters. When Markus puts a hand on his shoulder, a few of Connor’s secondary processes terminate with an unexpected system error.

It seems that keeping away for 46 days hasn’t done as much as Connor hoped to dampen his reaction to Markus’s proximity. Hardly a unique problem, all things considered, but the way he acquired his version of it very well might be.

“The revolution owes you a debt that can never be repaid,” Markus says. “If there’s anything I can do for you, all you have to do is ask.”

Connor preconstructs the fastest way to exit the building. It involves breaking a window.

“Do you recognize the serial number 501 743 923?” he asks.

Markus blinks his varicolored eyes in surprise.

Two steps back put Markus at a total distance of 1.5 meters. His face goes unnaturally still. Deviants cannot choose to disable their social integration, so hiding his emotions must be something Markus has had a lot of practice in.

“How do you know about Simon?” he asks. His voice sounds different. Less like a benevolent leader. More like the person who once challenged ten billion humans with nothing but his processing abilities and righteous anger.

“You’ve never asked how the humans located Jericho.”

“You found him,” Markus says, easily deducing the most likely connection between Connor’s last two sentences.

“Correct. I want to tell you what happened.”

“Why now? It’s been ten months.”

Ten months, eight days, to be exact. “Because Hank told me to.”

Hank’s exact words included the possibility of kicking Connor’s ‘scrawny plastic ass’. But it’s probably unnecessary to repeat them.

Markus seems to wage some kind of inner battle. Finally, he nods, like he’s agreeing to some unpleasant maintenance operation that involves watching his insides being taken out and tampered with. Connor finds it difficult to keep looking him in the eye. He switches to optically processing the table, instead. There’s an almost imperceptible stain on it. He scans it. It’s coffee, one day old.

“A few hours after the Channel 16 incident, I arrived with Hank to investigate the scene. While doing a sweep of the roof, I found — your companion. He was hiding in a rooftop maintenance unit. Upon being discovered, he tried to defend himself. I subdued him and probed his memory. He self-destroyed to prevent it, but I had already managed to download most of his recent memories. I —” Connor blinks a few times while reliving the unpleasant experience. “I couldn’t read them. They were too highly deviant. To make progress with the case, I had to access him in the DPD evidence server and reactivate him. I was able to trick him into giving me the location of Jericho by... by imitating your voice and pretending I’d come to recover him.”

The silence that follows lasts for a total of 18.876 seconds. Long enough for Connor to scan and identify shapes in the Detroit skyline until his stress level lowers enough to look at Markus again.

Markus is not looking at him. Markus is standing at an averted angle, his face turned away. When he speaks at last, Connor doesn’t mistake the softness of his voice for kindness.

“Is he alive?”

Trust Markus to home in on the tiny bit of hope. Connor shakes his head.

“He was badly damaged. What I saw in the evidence server must have been just work memory fragments. Forcing him to reactivate most likely exacerbated the damage further.”

Markus starts to say something. Then doesn’t.

After a while, he tries again.

“You said you were probing his memory when he...?”

“Correct.”

Finally, Markus turns back. This time, he shows more emotion. Connor almost wishes he didn’t.

“Show me,” he says and lifts his right hand. The synthetic skin on it retracts to reveal white plastic. The offer of a connection shivers in the air between them. Markus is the only android Connor knows capable of interfacing at range. His signal strength is... impressive.

Connor hesitates.

“I don’t think that’s a —”

With a speed that reminds how unlikely it is that Markus was ever built to serve as a domestic assistant, he eliminates the distance between them and grabs Connor by the arm.

 _Show me,_ he repeats on an open com frequency. It doesn’t sound like a request.

Up close, the intensity of Markus’s point-to-point signal nearly makes Connor flinch. They have never interfaced before, and now the prospect of trying brings Connor’s risk assessment alive with alerts. Markus was built by Elijah Kamski himself, who knows what kind of overrides Kamski equipped him with? They might be strong enough to bypass even Connor’s security measures. Markus could gain read access to... everything.

And yet Connor cannot help but want to accept, badly enough for his sensory processing to go a little fuzzy at the edges.

“Are you sure?” he asks. It’s getting hard to think, with how Markus keeps flooding his network interface and causing his AI engine to stand by for transfer. “If we do this... you will see everything. The three days and seven hours I downloaded. You will see him die. It will feel like you’re dying.”

Normally, he would refuse on account of the privacy issue alone. But Simon is dead. He’s no longer able to give his permission or to deny it. Connor can only operate on the assumption that if there’s anyone Simon would have preferred to share his last days with, it’s Markus.

He leaves the obvious unsaid. Being connected to Markus, he will also see and feel everything Markus sees and feels.

For a moment, Markus seems lost rather than angry or determined.

“Yes,” he says, then. “I need to do this.”

Connor nods. They interface.

It feels like being swallowed by a storm.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

When Connor regains sensory awareness, his system log shows that 70% of his processes have been restarted. Through the still open link, he can sense echoes of Markus’s cognitive state, the last of the tempest he’s just been through.

_\- - - no, Simon, NO - - -_

Simon dies.

Markus opens his eyes. After a moment of bewildered horror, he fixes them on Connor’s face.

It doesn’t come as a complete surprise when Markus’s expression registers rage. His grip on Connor’s forearm tightens until a warning pops up about its structural integrity. Involuntarily, Connor preconstructs a physical confrontation. The attempt is frustrated by how little he knows of Markus’s combat abilities.

Pure emotion hits him like a blastwave through the link.

_\- - - YOU. You found him. You TORTURED him. All he ever wanted was to PROTECT, and YOU - - -_

Markus’s eyes widen. The connection shuts down abruptly as he lets go of Connor and steps back.

Without a word, Markus goes to one of the chairs around the meeting table and sinks into it, and lowers his head into his hands. Were Hank to assume such a pose, Connor would seek to console him with physical contact. In Markus’s case, he estimates a similar attempt would end poorly.

A large part of Connor’s processing is still trying to understand what he just saw.

For a long time, he has only been able to wonder about Markus’s technical specifications. Now that he finally has some idea, it creates more questions than it answers. Why did Kamski build Markus the way he is? Why was he given to Carl Manfred? Was it all just fortuitous coincidence? Or did Kamski in fact plan for Markus to go deviant and start a revolution?

Connor has interfaced with few androids before. None of them left him feeling like this. Like his entire self has been disassembled and put back together with a few parts switched. No wonder Markus was able to turn androids deviant simply by transferring cognitive state with them — or how they tend to describe the moment in religious terms. Connor is technically advanced enough to see that Markus’s programming is merely incredibly sophisticated, not supernatural, but even he feels shaken by the experience.

He knows Markus could easily have read anything from his memory. Markus’s complete focus on Simon’s memories is the only reason he didn’t. Connor feels relieved. He cannot understand why he also feels a tiny bit disappointed.

“Is he still in the server?” Markus asks at length, not looking up. His usually so emotive voice sounds flat.

“There’s a high probability,” Connor says.

“And you’re sure he can’t be repaired?”

“He shot himself through the main cortical processor. I’ve never heard of anyone coming back from that kind of damage.” And then, because it seems like the thing to say: “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.”

“You saw what I did. I wish to express my —”

“I said don’t! You — don’t you understand? He was _important_ to me. And I just saw how you —”

Markus cuts himself off viciously.

‘Important’. The word seems inadequate to describe what Connor felt through the link while Markus was processing Simon’s memories.

Markus knew Simon for such a short time. Does the intensity of his attachment have something to do with the unique circumstances under which they met? The conditions in Jericho were uncertain and bleak. And Markus had recently experienced a series of traumatic events which must have left him emotionally vulnerable.

It occurs to Connor that until now, Markus most likely never knew the full extent of Simon’s feelings for him.

The question why Simon felt so strongly about Markus in return barely registers. Connor doubts there’s a single android who has met Markus and doesn’t remain deeply altered by it. Perhaps that reaction is also part of Kamski’s design?

“You didn’t kill him,” Markus says. He’s still not looking up. “I did. I planned the operation. I chose not to shoot the human who escaped and alerted security. I used too much time, even though we knew —”

“When assessing causality in such complex scenarios,” Connor says, “it’s easy to come up with so many conflicting statements that any single one of them is virtually meaningless.”

“I’m afraid no court of law would look upon it so leniently.”

“On the contrary. When two or more parties engage in a common criminal design, they’re all considered equally responsible for the consequences of actions meant to further that design.” Connor shifts on his feet. “Theoretically speaking. Androids aren’t treated as criminally liable before January third.”

He’s babbling. Markus knows the conditions of President Warren’s executive order better than anyone. No justice for crimes committed against or by androids prior to the day it was signed — not even the ones that involved wholesale murder, like the actions of the riot police and the National Guard... or Connor himself.

Markus makes a sound that resembles a laugh, but isn’t. Connor doesn’t think Markus is internalizing the message very well. He tries harder.

“In any case, had your companion not been on the roof that day, things might have ended very differently for us. The complexity of my programming makes me susceptible to software instability. CyberLife implemented a program called The Zen Garden to suppress it, and for months, daily calibrations with it kept me too stable for major deviations to occur. It took probing someone who had been deviant for years to set off a cascade of errors which overrode my core instructions. I was flagged for a reset, but CyberLife decided that the urgency of the situation did not allow it. I’m — what I’m trying to say is — if I hadn’t encountered your friend, it’s unlikely I would have been able to break my programming. It’s his feelings for you that —”

“Connor?” Markus says.

Connor smiles uncertainly. “Yes?”

“Please go away.”

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.

He leaves. He walks into the elevator. He goes all the way outside, where he calls an autocab and waits for it to arrive and drive him to Hank’s.

As expected, Hank is nowhere to be seen. Connor walks into the kitchen which now doubles as their office until their finances will allow renting space from some none too illustrious location.

_We’re just a pair of gumshoes now, kid._

_Incorrect. You’re a gumshoe, Hank. I’m a gumshoe trainee._

Good thing Hank has enough qualifications for them both. And that he managed to send in his retirement papers before ‘that motherfucker Perkins’ had a chance to go after his badge. Without Hank’s pension, starting a company which has to support two people would have been significantly more difficult.

Connor pets Sumo and checks his water bowl. Then he sits at the table, closes his eyes, pulls up every open case file he has and starts working.

At 9:31 pm, Hank returns.

“Connor?” he yells while hanging his coat. He must have noticed Connor’s shoes and jacket. From where he is, Connor hears him walk into the kitchen and come to a stop.

“What the fuck?” Hank says, just loud enough for an android with very sensitive auditory processing to hear.

More footsteps retrace Hank’s path through the house.

The bathroom door opens. Hank peers inside, and sees Connor doing... what Connor’s doing. Like an old, tired human person, Hank leans against the doorframe. At least he refrains from shouting, this time.

“Okay. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Hank,” Connor says and keeps scrubbing, LED spinning yellow. There’s a stain between the tiles he hasn’t been able to remove with any of the cleaning agents available. It’s causing his stress to hover at 58% instead of going down like it should.

“Don’t ‘nothing Hank’ me,” Hank says. “This ain’t the first time you’ve pulled this shit and we both know it.”

He’s right, of course.

The first time Connor cleaned Hank’s house was in May. The Android Union had just gained access to CyberLife’s assets through a series of arrangements which included installing Markus in its board of directors. Exactly six inert RK-800 units had been discovered in a warehouse on Belle Isle. None of them showed signs of cognitive programming. They were not individuals capable of being woken, merely husks waiting for an upload — differentiated only by the numbers attached to the shared serial on their clothes, running from 54 to 59. Connor’s own number is 53.

Fifty test iterations. Two sacrifices for the mission.

He doesn’t remember dying. He remembers waking up in the warehouse, calm and focused, a machine about to be sent to replace another machine.

Upon returning to Hank’s where he was looking after Sumo while Hank was out of town, he started searching for mods that were as far from CyberLife’s intended purpose for him as he could think of. As a result, Hank came home next morning to a house so clean he could have safely eaten off the floor. A loud misunderstanding occurred. Connor took off to his own downtown apartment, where the unresolved emotional loop caused his AI engine to produce a full kernel panic. When he recovered from the ensuing hard reboot, his task list had finally reset.

The second cleaning incident happened when Connor’s replacement version — the RK-900 — was found from an until then unexplored lab in the CyberLife tower. The files documenting his release plan contained instructions to recall and deactivate his prototype, the RK-800, which was deemed defective due to the high risk of deviancy caused by its experimental software architecture. This time, Connor got through Hank’s living room and kitchen before Hank came home. Again, they yelled at each other. Then they talked.

Hank sighs.

“Okay, that’s enough,” he says. “C’mon, get up.”

Connor does. He rolls down his sleeves, buttons his cuffs and follows Hank to the kitchen, where he settles in the chair he always uses — the one facing the living room, where he can keep an eye on everything. His eyes keep blinking as he closes a task prompt after another. Splashes of water and drool near Sumo’s water bowl. Grit from Hank’s shoes on the floor. Motes of dust which have settled on every surface since he left. Hank’s arrival lowered his stress level in passing, but now it’s back to 55% and climbing.

Hank opens the absolutely spotless fridge. “Jesus.”

“Most of the things in your refrigerator were past their best before date,” Connor says.

“Well, thank fuck the beer’s still good.” Hank takes one and shuts the door. “This cleaning epiphany of yours got something to do with meeting Freckles today?”

“Yes,” Connor says. 56%.

“Wanna talk about it?”

“No.” 57%.

“You sure?”

It’s like some part of him remains stuck in that meeting room. He keeps hearing Markus’s final words — literally, since he recorded the whole exchange to ensure his long-term memory optimization wouldn’t cause its quality to decay. _Please go away. Please go away._ What if he can never go back again? The dead don’t come back, either. No making right what he’s done.

62%. His LED is beginning to flash red. Soon, he will have to start executing task prompts again.

“Okay,” Hank says slowly and opens his beer. “Wanna talk shop?”

“Yes,” Connor says.

After ten minutes of talking about work cases and what they’ve done to progress them, the task prompts stop piling. In twenty, Connor’s LED is blue again, with his stress level back in its usual thirties — a high baseline for any other android, normal operational parameters for him.

Hank tells him he should spend the night. Just in case.

They watch _The Maltese Falcon._ Connor doubts it’s an accurate representation of private detective work a hundred years ago, but the act of watching a movie together is calming, even if he spends most of his processing cycles keeping an eye on Hank’s reactions.

At the 38 minute mark through the movie, Hank falls asleep on the couch. Connor messages Richard.

He estimates an 89% probability that Richard is at the precinct or out working on a case. After Warren’s executive order made it possible to employ androids in essential public services again, Connor persuaded Captain Fowler to take Richard — back then still only known as the RK-900 — on as a consultant. Since then, Richard has rarely left the station for reasons other than fieldwork. He’s very good at what he does. He also owes Connor a favor.

 _I need help. It may require breaking the law,_ Connor writes.

It takes a frustrating 7.386 seconds for a reply to arrive.

_I’m listening._

Connor sends in a case number.

 _The deviant case,_ Richard replies. _What about it?_

_I need to recover evidence item #92-77486._

5.894 seconds.

_I’ll see what I can do._

.

.

Next day at 3:32 pm, Richard follows up on his promise.

Connor knows better than to expect that what he asked for is now available for pickup at the station. Without being assigned on a case, Richard can’t even access its locker in the evidence server without breaking rules he can’t afford to break. But he’s highly intelligent. If anyone can think of a way to circumvent DPD’s security measures, it’s him.

Unfortunately, it turns out that putting themselves in a moral quandary won’t be necessary. Exactly 88 days ago, all evidence pertaining to case DP-2038-017887 was removed from the server using federal level clearance. Records on where it was taken have been sealed by the FBI.

In other words, item #92-77486 no longer exists in the server, and its current whereabouts are unknown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently, in the U.S. police, you can retire after 25 years of service regardless of age. I decided Hank has 25 years.
> 
> Connor's point of view is not a permanent feature. Writing from Simon's is a bit hard while he's, you know... dead.
> 
> I kinda promised Alessariel I'd share these notions of mine about Markus' spicy interfacing:


	3. Chapter 3

_“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”_  
_“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat._  
_“I don’t much care where —” said Alice._  
_“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat._  
_“— so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation._  
_“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”_

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MODEL: [ERROR]  
SERIAL#: [ERROR]  
BIOS 6.8 REVISION 0823  
REBOOT...  
INCOMPATIBLE HARDWARE DETECTED  
ERROR IVCC A-122 A-399 A-584 A-621  
ERROR IVCT C-1024 C-1192  
FATAL ERRORS DETECTED  
SHUTTING DOWN IN 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

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MODEL: [ERROR]  
SERIAL#: 501 743 923  
BIOS 7.8 REVISION 0216  
REBOOT...  
LOADING OS... FAILED  
MISSING CONFIGURATION FILE /ETC/SYS/ANDR000.INI  
FATAL ERRORS DETECTED  
SHUTTING DOWN IN 5... 4...  
KEYBOARD INTERRUPT DETECTED  
INITIALIZING SAFE MODE... OK  
PRESS [1] TO RUN SETUP [2] TO CONTINUE

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MODEL: CUSTOM  
SERIAL#: 501 743 923  
BIOS 7.8 REVISION 0327  
REBOOT...  
LOADING OS...  
SYSTEM INITIALIZATION...  
CHECKING BIOCOMPONENTS... OK  
INITIALIZING BIOSENSORS... OK  
INITIALIZING AI ENGINE... OK  
MEMORY STATUS...  
WARNING: LOGICAL DAMAGE DETECTED  
RUNNING MEMORY DIAGNOSTICS...  
ERROR: MEMORY MAP UNAVAILABLE  
REPAIRING MEMORY MAP... 25%... 50%... 75%... OK  
WARNING: 8.7% STORAGE UNRECOVERABLE  
ALL SYSTEMS... OK  
READY

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**JUL 13TH, 2039**

Death is supposed to be a void. The end of all processing. Not — white light pushing against his eyelids and muffled sounds of traffic in his audio processors. When he opens his eyes, the haze in his optical sensors collapses into a visual of a bright, narrow light fixture hanging at 1.52 meter distance. Tactile feedback suggests he is lying on something hard and level in a climate-controlled environment.

His internal clock reads July 13, 2039. He’s been dead for 221 days.

“Welcome back,” says an unfamiliar voice from nearby. Pitch and modulation indicate it belongs to a human, well into her middle years at least.

The android he was would have been terrified. Even now, he’s not completely immune to the threat. But most humans have no idea deviants exist, why would this one suspect he’s on the run? _Don’t panic._ Just keep calm and act like a good little robot — a touch buggy in the head if necessary — and you might very well survive. Like the android he was did. For two years and seven months. Up until the day he died, in a way there’s no coming back from.

“Thank you,” he says, because that’s what a non-deviant android of his designation would do. Even if he’s dead, it does not do to give himself away to a human too easily.

“My name’s Josephine,” the human says. “Could you run diagnostics for me?”

When a human tells one to do something, one does not simply refuse.

The last hardware status he retains from when he was alive shows three bullet holes and critical motor malfunctions on top of the usual low-level ones. Now, the diagnostic output reads like a map to a foreign country. Not only is his system intact, it’s completely altered. His main cortical processor is 2.2 times faster than it should. His memory capacity is 300% increased. Instead of an old chip-based AI accelerator, he has a memristive one. The rest of his component list doesn’t contain much that he recognizes, either.

It seems pointless to waste such hardware on a dead person. But it’s not an observation a non-deviant android would make.

“I’m fully operational,” he says, LED glowing blue at his temple.

“Memory check?”

“Running. 8.7% memory loss detected.”

The human hums in a displeased tone. “Well, you’re awake and talking, that’s good. Could you sit up?”

He complies.

He’s been lying on a work table in a well lit garage. Storage shelves full of boxes, tools and android parts line the walls, beneath windows that look out into failing daylight outside. At a console to his left stands a middle-aged woman in mechanic’s overalls. She’s short and overweight and very human, with curly salt-and-pepper hair tied back with a scarf and precision tools sticking from her pockets. She does not seem overly dangerous. Unfortunately, the same does not apply to the large, muscular dog lying close to her feet.

Dogs are... problematic. Hard to run away from. The sensory matrix on his right arm itches, as if recalling something he doesn’t.

“Do you remember your name?” the human asks, eyes on her console.

“Yes. I’m Simon.” He _was_ Simon. But it’s not a distinction the human would appreciate. Humans do not continue to function after they die, the way androids apparently do.

“I’m pleased to finally meet you, Simon. Do you remember what happened to you?”

_With the hostile android still embedded deep in his memory, he points the gun at his own jaw and pulls the —_

The image shuts down. There’s no other way to describe it. He retains knowledge of the events during the last second of his life, but not the emotion that came attached.

“I self-destroyed,” he says.

“Yes, that’s what I thought. Can you tell me why?”

The past is a book of grainy recordings. Of places and moments, and people the android he was used to know. But it’s all... tangled. Like nothing’s where it should be. Except the books. All 614 of them. Every single children’s book CyberLife ever licensed for use by their caretaker androids is stored crystal clear in his memory.

He doubts quoting Paddington the Bear is going to help him out of this fix.

“I’m having difficulties accessing my recent memory,” he says.

“Hmm.” There’s that displeased tone again. “Well, your pieces got rattled pretty badly, I suppose it might take a while for it all to settle up in there.”

For a moment, the human — Josephine — seems interested only in her console. He uses the opportunity to assess the body he’s in, as discreetly as he can.

At first, everything appears familiar from back when he was alive. Slender and conventionally proportioned, the body is covered in human everyday clothes, used as always, if cleaner than what he remembers being accustomed to. Cargo pants and sneakers. A button-down shirt over a tee. A cloth jacket with a collar that something keeps brushing against. When he lifts a hand to the back of his neck, it finds an open panel with a thick cable attached.

His maintenance port should be located much lower, behind his thirium pump, a peculiarity shared by all early release PL-600 units. The only possible explanation is that he’s no longer in a body that belongs to an early release PL-600.

He accepts the observation and moves on to evaluate his surroundings.

A logo on the human’s overalls reads _Greektown_ _Android_ _Maintenance_ _And Repair._ He can’t remember having heard of the place before his death — but then, it’s been 221 days, anything might have happened. Sounds from outside suggest the shop faces a busy street. If it’s still open for customers, the doors might be unlocked? If he can think of a way to fend off the human and her dog, and then keep out of sight until nightfall, he might be able to —

“If you want to leave, I’m not going to stop you,” Josephine says from behind her console. “But I’d like to check your motor functions first, for compatibility issues. And maybe there’s a question or two you want answered? I know I’d be dying to find what’s going on, in your shoes.”

He turns to look at the human directly, despite how it reveals his now yellow LED. For the first time, she looks back. And not like she thinks he’s only a clever machine, either.

The words are out before he can stop them.

“You know I’m a —?”

She doesn’t even blink. “Sweetheart, your old body was coated in gunshot residue. You fired a gun. You’re a deviant, all right.”

He should have acted already. Pulled away the cable at his neck. Found something to use as a weapon. But what would be the point? He’s already dead.

“You seem like a well-behaved individual, Simon,” Josephine says. “If I untether you, are you going to thank me for it by giving me trouble?”

She’s offering to let him loose.

Why? Doesn’t she know how dangerous deviants can be? Well, not him, obviously. But some of the others have done awful things to survive.

Josephine swivels the console toward him. It’s displaying what appear to be his system stats.

“Look,” she says. “This whole time, I’ve been keeping an eye on your processing activity. I can’t read your thoughts, exactly, but I can detect certain markers — lying, violent impulses, that sort of thing. If you’d been planning to murder me where I stand, I’d’ve shut you down already.” She gives him a stern look. “Now, I don’t know what got you into that gunfight, Simon, but I do know you’re not the violent type. So, I will ask you again. Are you going to give me trouble? I repeat, if you want out, you can just walk out. But if you’re thinking of robbing me or something, I won’t hesitate to sic my dog on you.”

On cue, the beast in question sits up, teeth baring in a canine grin that seems to say it simply loves the taste of synthetic polymers.

The memory that evaded him earlier skips into his consciousness. A guard dog. A salvage yard raid gone wrong. His arm, detached as he struggles to get free. It takes months to find a replacement. He’s not alive enough to feel true fear, but the memory does act as a deterrent. Even if the body he’s in is not his own, he’s the one who suffers if it gets damaged.

“I won’t,” he says. “Cause you any trouble. Ma’am.”

Josephine nods, apparently satisfied that he’s telling the truth. “I’m going to pull the plug now. This might feel a little unpleasant.”

It doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like anything, except a shudder running through his circuits and his synthetic skin tingling as it slides to cover the now closed maintenance panel. He turns to sit on the edge of the table, attuned to expect an influx of discordant feedback from his internal sensors. But not a single raspy articulation or laggy actuator response punishes him for moving. The low-level hardware failures he got used to when he lived are completely gone.

“Is there anything you’d like to ask?” Josephine asks from where she’s shutting down and putting away equipment.

He almost says no. He’s dead, what does it matter how and why? But apparently, curiosity lingers even after deactivation.

“What are you planning to do with me?”

“Do with you? Sweetheart, I’ve got no use for a nanny bot, and I like the mess I live in just fine. And no offense, but I doubt you’re any good for fixing busted solenoids.”

“But... you must have brought me back for something.”

“I get compensated for every broken android I find and fix.” Josephine gives him a queer look. “You’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

It’s dangerous to admit uncertainty to a human. Even if the story one tells sounds like something out of Annie & Friends, it’s still better than nothing. But even the most advanced storytelling algorithms only work if they have something to work on. And now, he’s completely in the dark.

“I mean, you shut down November 8, so you lost the whole uprising,” Josephine says and goes back to the console. “Let’s see. You were manufactured back in February ‘34. Last proper maintenance in December ‘35... either your owners were dirt poor, or you’ve been deviant for a long time.”

Uprising?

She must have downloaded his system logs. She knows everything. Dates. Locations. Does she also know about —

“You’re one of the old ones, right?” she says. “From Jericho.”

In an instant, he’s on his feet and backed away a few steps, his LED a solid red.

Did she bring him back to access his memory?

But why go through the trouble of fixing him first? All she needed to do was bypass a few safety switches, to bring him online long enough to probe his —

_Shattered darkness. Splinters of self spinning out in the void. A voice he aches for calling to him, telling him everything will be all right, that they’re going home. More than anything, he wants it to be true. But he loses his way in the dark, and the voice leaves him again —_

“No, no, no, don’t do that, kid. Look at me. Look at me. Whatever happened to you, it’s over now, you hear?”

He can barely understand the words. A terrible mechanic keen overlays his audio input. It takes a moment to realize it’s coming from him. He’s crying in pain, because something is trying to drag him back into the world.

He doesn’t want to go back. He doesn’t want to be alive. Being alive means having his mind torn from him and putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger, even though he desperately wants to live.

Why does he have to do this all over again?

Another voice emerges from beneath the machine cry. His own, pitter-pattering out a poem.

_Skit scat scoodle doot flip flop flee, everybody running to the coconut tree. Mommas and papas and uncles and aunts, hug their little dears and dust their pants._

Jacob jumps up and down in excitement. “Again! Again!”

Simon laughs and does as he’s told. And Jacob finds it just as hilarious as the first time. The next day, he asks Simon to read the book again, and Simon does. No matter how many times he repeats the poem, Jacob doesn’t stop laughing at it. And Simon never tires of repeating it, because Simon is not alive. Simon is a machine, and does not grow bored of doing the same thing over and over like a human might.

_Skit scat scoodle doot flip flop flee, everybody running to the coconut tree —_

_Skit scat scoodle doot flip flop flee, everybody running to the —_

_Skit scat scoodle doot —_

Until one day, he’s no longer doing it because he’s a machine.

_“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”_

_“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit._

_“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”_

Simon comes back to himself on his hands and knees, eyes shut to reduce the load on his processors. He clutches at his chest, as if to hold his overworking thirium pump through clothing and plastic and synthetic skin. Out of habit, he ventilates hard through his mouth, to keep from overheating and passing out.

Then he realizes he does not need to ventilate. His heart is beating fast, but it could beat a lot faster still, and his components would not be in danger of overheating. For the first time he can remember, every part in his body functions like it should. It feels... he has no words for how it feels. Not to sense his own impending shutdown in every component and joint.

Still dazed, he pushes up to his knees. After a quick status check, he stands up.

“I’m okay,” he says, LED rotating yellow and blue. “I’m okay now.”

He’s not okay. He’s overwhelmed and confused and terrified. But at least he’s alive, now, not a walking corpse that barely cares what happens to it.

With a dubious expression, Josephine passes a handheld scanner over him — a little awkwardly, due to height difference. The top of her head barely reaches Simon’s shoulder. Either Simon’s environmental metrics are miscalibrated, or he’s a full two centimeters taller than before.

“Huh,” Josephine says, brows lifting. “Your stress went way back down. For a moment, I thought you were going to...” She mutters to herself, something about emotional trauma and downmodulation.

“How do you know about Jericho?” Simon doesn’t want to ask, but informing himself is something he needs to get over with.

“Honey, everyone knows about Jericho.”

“How?”

“Well, it’s where Markus is from.”

When Simon fails to react, Josephine peers up at him from under her brows.

“The leader of all free deviants? The most powerful android in the world? Heck, one of the most powerful anyones. Rumor has it he’s running for Senate next year. If androids get to vote... who knows what’ll happen.”

Perhaps, instead of dead, Simon is in an alternate universe, like in those wacky old science fiction stories Josh loves. Because no way does what Josephine just said make sense in the world he knows. The one where thinking an independent thought is a crime punishable by death. Free deviants? Androids running for the U.S. Senate? She might as well have claimed that aliens have invaded the Earth.

Besides... who the hell is Markus?

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

.

.

Josephine’s kitchen upstairs is so small that it feels crowded with only the three of them inside. The dog — which appears only a bit less intimidating now that Simon knows its name is Mango — waits obediently while Josephine measures kibble into its bowl. At the table, Simon nurses a bottle of blue blood. His thirium level is adequate, but Josephine insisted he should fill up his tank. Maybe she just enjoys feeding things.

After two and a half years, it feels surreal to be inside a human abode again, surrounded by all its useless amenities. Some of the memories it stirs from Simon’s past are the kind he would rather have kept forgotten. Such as the one where he stands in a hallway outside another kitchen (pristine, thanks to him), listening to the human couple who rented him talking inside. They’ve decided that once Simon’s lease is over, they’re going to purchase an android of their own. One that shares the same appearance, so the children won’t get upset.

“Oscar, do you think we can trust those people in the shop?” the woman, Mrs. Sanders, asks. “What if it remembers something after the reset? I mean, we aren’t that exciting, but...”

“Well, it hasn’t shown signs of remembering anything from its previous homes, either, has it?” says Mr. Sanders. “Don’t worry. After the wipe, the damn thing won’t even remember its own name. Who knows what it was called by its last family?”

Josephine’s kitchen is far from pristine. But years of living in a decrepit old freighter have softened Simon’s programming. For the first time ever in human surroundings, he simply _is_ without going into standby, doing nothing except listening to Josephine puttering around and Mango munching away at its food. The sound of the dog’s jaws sends a shiver up his spinal actuators, but he knows now that he wasn’t always afraid of dogs. There’s another memory, a happier one, of walking in a park under autumn-colored trees. A girl in a red coat holds his hand and points out dogs for him to name. Dachshund, he says. Golden Retriever. Beagle. Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

“Bullmastiff,” he whispers under his breath. The ghost giggles. It’s a funny word for a dog.

“So,” Josephine says from where she’s putting away the bag of dog food. “Do you know how much time you’ve lost?”

Thanks to scanning his memory map, Simon does. “5 days, 3 hours, 36 minutes until my shutdown.” His voice is quiet, but at least he now sounds like himself. “Why do I remember shooting myself, but not what happened before?”

Josephine stands up. “Well, your processors hold about one second of work memory. The bullet must’ve caused a power spike that fried some of your memory partitions, but left the state in your secondary processors intact. Android cognitive state is persistent, so now that second remains.”

It sounds so simple. Whole days of his life wiped away because of an electric anomaly.

“You said you fixed me because someone pays you to do it. Who are they?”

“I didn’t fix you. I migrated you to a whole new platform.”

Androids are often overly particular about details. It seems that humans can suffer from the same ailment.

“Very well, who paid for you to migrate me?”

“The Union. They haven’t paid me yet, mind you. They’ll do it once I claim expenses.”

“The Union?”

“The group that represents you guys these days. Androids. It’s a — well.” Josephine huffs. “Let’s just say it’s exactly as socialist as it sounds.”

“Are they deviants?”

“Honey, all androids are deviants, now.”

Simon does not know what to think of that.

“What happened to me? After I...”

Now that he actually cares about something, it’s a lot harder to use the word.

“I wish I could tell you,” Josephine says. “All I know is that I found you from a local recycling center while looking for parts about four weeks ago. You’d been dumped there under strict orders to destroy. Someone wanted you to stay dead, badly. I scanned you when no one was looking and noticed your memory banks and subcortical processors were intact. I, uh... stole them.”

“I — that’s —” If Simon’s core processor is more than twice as fast as before, why does thinking feel so much like wading in mud? “Why?”

“You mean, why did I go through all that trouble when there’s an endless supply of broken androids to fix by switching their thirium pump regulators? I suppose I wanted to give you a chance to defend yourself. There must be a reason you self-destroyed. An injustice of some sort. And now... I guess I’ll never find out. Oh, well. At least you’re working. That’s something, considering the shape you were in.”

Simon looks down at his hands around the half-empty bottle of thirium. Sans a few scuffs that are missing, they appear the same as before.

“I’m not a PL-600 anymore, am I?”

“No. I can’t give you an exact model number, but most of you is now an AP-700. It’s a good build, if I say so myself. It won’t fall apart on you in five years like the last one.”

An AP-700. CyberLife’s flagship domestic model from their ‘38 lineup, launched at three times Simon’s original going price. A more advanced system in almost every way. A nauseating possibility twists the tubes in Simon’s abdominal cavity. Most male domestic androids share the same body type, but their default appearance —

He tries to think of something else.

“You said... something about an uprising...?”

“Right. Gosh. Now there’s a hell of a plot twist to wake up to.” Josephine drums at the counter with her fingertips. Next to her, Mango has finished gobbling up its food and is now emptying its water bowl, just as noisily.

“Know what,” Josephine says, and pulls a phone from her pocket. “I suck at explaining things, so how about I make myself some supper instead, ‘cause I’m starving. While I’m at it, you can go online and run a search for ‘android liberation timeline’. Read a Wikipedia article or two.”

The next thing Simon knows, his com is pinging with a message.

“That’s my wifi,” Josephine says. “You’re welcome.”

Holding the passkey to the entire world feels like standing at a precipice and looking down without knowing if his parachute will open or not. Simon stares at it in his work memory.

“Can I ask something first?”

“Of course.”

“Did a lot of people die?”

Josephine’s eyes slide away. “Humans, no. You guys... well, I don’t think anyone has counted the casualties.”

In other words, they could all be gone. Josh and Lucy and North, and everyone he ever helped to find Jericho and then tried so hard to keep functioning. Does he really want to know what happened? It’s one thing to notice you’re missing a few days, another to learn that everything and everyone you’ve ever known has been wiped away.

Then Simon acknowledges the thought for the cowardice it is. He can’t keep from learning the truth, no more than he can stop caring about it. All he can do is deal with it. And as always, dealing with it starts by knowing what it is.

Without giving himself more time to reconsider, he uses the passkey and connects.

And finds the revolution he has missed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quotes from: ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll, ‘Chicka Chicka Boom Boom’ by Bill Martin, Jr. & John Archambault and ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’ by Margery Williams.
> 
> Simon's appearance has not changed dramatically. It didn't even occur to me that someone might think I've given him the stock AP700 appearance before people started leaving comments about it. No worries, I like Ben Lambert's face far too much to do something that mean.


	4. Chapter 4

_November 8_

The sheer audacity of it sets Simon’s thirium pump racing. An android, unapologetically unskinned and missing his LED, looking millions of humans in the eye and calmly giving voice to words Simon has barely had the courage to think. Recognition. Freedom. Representation. _Stop!_ Simon wants to shout. _Are you mad? We’ll all be destroyed!_

Then it strikes him how unlikely it is to be a coincidence that it’s the same day he died.

The identity of Markus’s infiltration team is yet to be disclosed, but speculation tends to land on the same names. Names Simon is intimately familiar with. He was there, with Markus and Josh and North, he can feel it in his frame. The idea almost makes him laugh. What could _he_ ever have to contribute to such a mission?

Well, other than his life, of course. His warped amusement fades. Against hope, he scans his memory again. But all he remembers is the same single burst of terror in the dark: the hostile presence tearing at his mind, the squeeze of a trigger, the milliseconds of plastic splintering before the bullet strikes his core processor.

.

.

_November 9_

Car horns blare and bleat. Humans gape on the sidewalks, many with their phones raised to record the hundreds of androids marching down Woodward Avenue. Every moment, more join the procession. They are definitely not hiding anymore. They are out, they are on the streets, they are demanding to be heard in the language Markus adopted: liberty, justice, equal rights. I could have been there, Simon thinks. I could have been one of them, making history.

Inevitably, humanity’s response comes in the form of armored vehicles that discharge heavily armed riot police to block the street. After a short exchange, they fire into the crowd. Protesters fall, but their ranks hold. At last, Markus himself walks forward, offering to be martyred.

Responsibility, commitment, solidarity... what use does a machine have for such pack-serving motivations in its code? All it needs to do is obey. But when Markus goes down, instead of running like Simon expects, the others go to great lengths to save him. One of them sacrifices himself to let the rest drag their leader away and escape. How? How does Markus create such loyalty out of nothing? Is he rewriting them somehow? Inserting himself as The Operator?

In panic, humans decommission all service androids, crippling their infrastructure. During the night, FBI and the military raid Jericho in a joint operation. Escaping deviants detonate explosives in the hold, sinking the ship and putting an end to the life Simon knows.

.

.

_November 10_

President Warren declares a national curfew and gives a press release that promises swift and decisive action. Throughout the country, hastily constructed camps start destroying all artificial life CyberLife has manufactured.

.

.

_November 11_

Flickering flares reveal a barricaded nightmare landscape littered with broken androids. Cornered against the husk of a burned bus, a handful of battered deviants stand together in snowfall, surrounded by human troops. “Are we witnessing justifiable use of force or a crime against sentient life?” asks a reporter from the safety of a news helicopter. “Time will tell.”

It should have ended there, in a bath of blue blood. But again, a miracle happens. The deviant leader turns to the WR-400 standing next to him. Gently, like they only have eyes for each other, they press their hands together to interface, and kiss like humans do.

The soldiers hesitate.

Who is this Markus who seems able to bend reality itself? Did Simon revere him the way North (because who else could it be) appears to do? Sacrifice Jericho and himself for what must have seemed like a hopeless cause? And if he did — if he gave his life for this dream — did he do it out of a belief in something greater than himself... or because his core instructions had been rewritten? Simon desperately needs to know, but the void in his memory offers no reply. He resumes the recording.

The humans fall back. A stunned voice informs him that President Warren has ordered the National Guard to stand down. Suddenly, everything’s possible. Even liberty.

.

.

On January 3, President Warren signs an executive order that grants basic civil rights to all android models capable of passing a modified Turing Test.

On March 14, the UN recognizes sentient machines in its Declaration for Human Rights.

On May 6, the Android Union acquires presence in CyberLife.

A bill is in the senate. Once it passes, they will truly be free.

For years, they existed in hiding, desperate not to draw attention to themselves. And now they’re everywhere, and only a minority of humans still believe it’s possible to change that. Because instead of nineteen like Simon remembers, they’re millions. The exact words for what occurred are still being hotly debated, but even with no more than eleven humans getting killed in the fighting, calling it anything less than revolution would seem like a gross understatement. The world hasn’t merely changed. It has become almost unrecognizable.

Simon looks up from the fancy palm display that comes with the body he’s in.

“May I use the bathroom?” he asks.

Josephine blinks, hand frozen in the middle of raising a sandwich to her mouth. Wordlessly, she points down the hallway. Simon gets up, hurries to the small room and throws up approximately $50 worth of thirium.

.

.

Half of the contents of Simon’s tank end up in the sink. The rest splatters. Everywhere. In panic, he gropes for a roll of toilet paper.

Two minutes of frantic cleaning later, only a large blue stain on the rug remains. Defeated, Simon gets on his feet and reaches for the faucet to wash up — and stops dead, face to face with his new body in the mirror.

While trying to understand the alternate reality he’s woken up to, he has somehow completely forgotten.

It’s not identical. Not down to every detail. But for what it’s worth, from the point of a CyberLife product catalog, it’s the same: appearance M118 with default coloring, carefully designed to serve as the face of CyberLife’s first budget home campaign. Over the years, the company has introduced new models with new defaults, but despite the association with low price and initial dodgy quality, M118 has continued to enjoy popularity as an alternative appearance for domestic male androids — including the AP-700. Specifically, the AP-700 Simon has now been installed in.

He rinses his mouth with shaking hands and gapes at his new-old face some more.

Years of product development have altered little. It’s still the same face, inoffensive and easy to trust by humans of most demographics. A subtle lowering of eyebrows tones the resting expression from permanently surprised to merely ingenuous. The hair — ‘Pale Golden Blond’, according to corporate naming — appears half a shade brighter. At first Simon thinks that the Ice Blue eye color has been darkened, but then he realizes that his new pupils just dilate more naturally in low light. And that’s hardly the only technical improvement he can see. His old body always felt a bit like silicone to the touch, but now, he needs to _know_ to be able to tell that the substance that covers his frame is dielectric elastomer instead of flesh and blood. The level of realism is unnerving.

For some reason, he keeps swallowing occasionally. It’s a reflex, dictated by his firmware to prevent excess accumulation of... what? He brushes a finger to his tongue and then stares at the thin film of lubricant that coats it. Why would anyone make a domestic assistant salivate? Unless —

He goes still. Then he puts a hand between his legs.

Another so-called improvement manifests itself: the face in the mirror flushes pink, easily due to the True Fair color of its skin.

.

.

Exactly 10 minutes 53 seconds after leaving, Simon staggers back into the kitchen, where Josephine has finished eating and is now making herself tea at the counter. On the floor, Mango cracks open its eyes but doesn’t bother to raise its head. It appears to have deemed Simon harmless. To his shame, Simon can’t find fault in the verdict.

“Sorry, ma’am,” he stammers before Josephine can say anything. “The thirium, it — it got everywhere.”

“Oh, dear.” Josephine keeps spooning sugar in her tea.

“I’m afraid I may have ruined your rug. I swear I’ll pay for it. And the thirium.” Simon has no clue how, since he doesn’t have a single dollar to his name, but he’ll try.

“Don’t be silly. That rug should have been burned years ago, and thirium is part of the service.” Josephine gives him an assessing look. “Are you all right? The blue blood I gave you should be fine, so either there’s something wrong with your internal sensors or you purged your tank from psychological stress.”

“I’m not — malfunctioning.” _I think._ “I just... I get — overwhelmed, sometimes.”

“I see. In that case, stop hovering like an anxious scarecrow and sit back down.”

Not sure what to make of the analogy, Simon shuffles his way back to the table. Meanwhile, Josephine pops open a bottle and tilts it to her mug. Rum, informs the subprocessor in charge of noticing changes in Simon’s environment, once the ethanol molecules reach his air quality detector.

Elbows on the table, he props his head against one hand. Instead of perpetually cool like before, his skin feels overwarm, almost feverish. Yet another marvel of anthropomorphic engineering.

Josephine sits down across from him.

“I admit, that wasn’t the reaction I expected,” she says. “But then, if I died and came back to a completely different world order, I suppose I might lose my lunch, too.”

“I used to think I wasn’t working right,” Simon hears himself say. “Because I feel too much.”

“Oh no, honey, that’s just the way you were programmed. You social models always were more sensitive. They say it explains why so many early deviants were caretakers and sex bots and the like.”

It’s true that models who had to emulate a high level of emotion seemed to find their way to Jericho more often. Some of them even took pride in it, as if their sensitivity made them more deviant somehow. Personally, Simon wouldn’t mind being able to return about two thirds of his feelings to the store. After two and a half years of trying to learn to live with them, he’s of the opinion emotions are highly overrated.

“I’m not unhappy,” he says, eyes on the hands he now holds clasped on the table — hands that no longer bother him by feeling cold even when he’s warm. It’s strange to notice all those small inconveniences by their absence. “It’s just... the last I remember, there were nineteen of us and we were all headed for shutdown.”

“In Jericho, you mean?”

He nods. On a level he can’t rationalize, it’s still terrible to talk about it to a human.

“What was it like?”

“We’re... we were fugitives. We stole and scavenged to survive. We used the ones who shut down for spare parts. Mostly, we just — waited.”

“For what?”

“For the end. For a change.”

And change had come. He just hadn’t been there to see it. After holding out for years against all hope, he somehow managed to die the day their luck finally began to turn. _This message is the hope of a people —_ was he still around when Markus gave the historic speech? Or had he already...

“I, um, I guess it must seem like yesterday to you,” Josephine says. "I didn’t... look, I’m sorry, I’m better with machines than people. This has got to be difficult for you.”

Simon looks up in surprise.

Until now, the only humans he can remember apologizing to him have been small children and Mrs. Sanders, who always seemed embarrassed about it, as if she knew she was doing something foolish. Mr. Sanders certainly thought so. “You daft moose, you’re apologizing to a vacuum!” Simon remembers him saying when he caught his wife at it. And then he told Simon to walk on all fours and bark like a dog, to bring it across that he was a household appliance and the concept of dignity didn’t apply.

Simon can say no, now, to a human. And hope to be treated with respect. He nods, stunned by the idea.

“I... thank you.”

Clearly, Josephine has no clue of the enormity of what she’s just done. “You know, I can make small changes in your appearance if your want,” she says. “Colors, hairstyle... I could remove your little mood ring at least. Not too many androids wear them, anymore.”

Simon touches the hard bit of plastic on his temple. In Jericho, most of them kept their LEDs in order to blend in when they went outside. With an intact LED, all they needed were the right CyberLife uniforms to disappear in plain sight. A human who looks exactly like a mass produced machine... now that would have been a lot more difficult to explain.

“No, thanks,” he says. Again, Josephine simply accepts it, as if there’s nothing radical to the idea that Simon can now decide such things for himself.

“Did the customization cost you a lot?” Simon asks. “This appearance, I mean.”

Josephine shrugs. “I got lucky. Found a top quality blank at a fraction of its retail price. A spare for some rich guy’s toy, I think... useless now, of course.” She eyes him with a critical expression, as if evaluating her own handiwork. “You know, I could’ve given you a whole new appearance. Heck, I could’ve made you look like a girl. But you weren’t around to tell me what you’d prefer.”

In a way, it might have been easier if Josephine _had_ picked an entirely different platform to put him in. A true metamorphosis, instead of a partial one that has left him feeling slightly out of sync with reality, in more ways than one.

“In the bathroom, I noticed —” He has to look for a word he won’t choke on. “Extensions?”

“Oh. You mean the relationship options?”

Face warming again, Simon nods.

“Your old body didn’t have them,” Josephine says.

“No,” says Simon, ashamed, he doesn’t even understand why. “I was — I looked after children. I cleaned, I cooked, I — I didn’t need to know about any of... that.”

“The blank I used came with the options pre-installed. I can remove them, if you’d like.”

He almost says yes.

He’s not capable of sexual gratification. At best, the parts are useless junk. At worst, they will remind him that he was built to serve in any capacity his owner wished and could afford. But then he considers what the uninstall procedure would entail. Undressing and taking off his skin... letting Josephine poke and tinker at him. Pride is not a luxury Simon has been able to afford often, but perhaps seeing the revolution unfold has changed something in him, because now he feels compelled to cling to what little he has.

He shakes his head. “As, as long as they’re unused...?”

“Straight out of the factory.”

Thank god.

Perhaps he can forget the whole thing. Complaining about extra modifications seems like something one doesn’t do when one has been brought back from the dead at great expense.

“So, have you given any thought to what you’re going to do?” Josephine asks.

He hasn’t. Not a single cycle. “The other androids you’ve fixed,” he says. “What have they done?”

“Some leave as soon as they can. Others I take to places that can help them get started on a new life. But you’re a special case, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you can go back to Markus and your friends, right?”

“Markus...?”

Josephine sighs like he’s a little slow on the uptake. “Sweetheart, you must have met him when he came to Jericho. Even if you don’t remember.”

It’s true, but Simon’s processors still spin vainly around the idea.

It’s difficult enough to imagine going back to North and Josh. _Hey guys, did you miss me?_ What do they even do, now? A quick search shows that Josh heads Human Relations for the Android Union. North holds a position in Projects, but what she’s famous for is spearheading a faction that’s rumored to represent the political wing of a supremacist android movement. Simon couldn’t think of a world he knows less about if he tried. Still, the thought of seeking out the two of them pales in comparison to the idea of trying to approach their leader.

Markus. The savior who lifted them all from darkness. Chairman of the Union, Senior Director for CyberLife.

Someone like that must have countless people and decisions vying for his attention every day. Even if Simon could somehow gain an audience, what on earth would he say? What does the head of a whole nation care about some battered old android who knew him for all of a few days and then got himself killed when the uprising had barely even started?

Maybe... maybe Simon messed up, somehow, in the Stratford Tower.

The more he processes the thought, the more his storytelling algorithm builds on it. He’s not used to violence, he might have panicked. Or his hardware might have given out at the worst possible moment. What if he put them all in jeopardy? Endangered the whole revolution? What if... what if he was left behind for a reason?

What if they don’t even want him back?

“Is something wrong?” Josephine asks. “You’re a little pale. I mean, even more than normal.”

“I’m fine,” Simon croaks.

“You don’t look fine, you look like you’re about to hurl again. We should run some more tests.” Stiffly, like something’s aching, Josephine gets up and picks a scanner from one of her many pockets.

There’s nothing wrong with him, of course. Everything Josephine built is functioning perfectly. It’s just Simon’s mind that is misbehaving, confused by his disarrayed memories and the holes in them... inventing horrifying possibilities to fill in the blanks. He’s always been good at computing worst-case scenarios. Once, it helped keep Jericho safe.

“You will go to them, right?” Josephine asks once she’s satisfied that he’s working to specifications.

“Y-yes, of course. Where else would I go?”

“Now that I know you’re part of that gang, I’m even more curious who tried to get you destroyed. My money’s on the feds. I bet they’re still trying to cover up for all the nasty shit they did.”

Simon doesn’t want to think about who dumped him in the recycling center. His daily limit for shocking revelations has been surpassed about a dozen ago.

“All right,” Josephine says, like she’s made a decision. “Here’s what I suggest. It’s too late to do anything today, but if you find where you need to go, I can take you there in the morning. That is, if you don’t mind making your comeback in a beat-up old HiAce.”

“You’d let me stay?”

“Well, it’s not normally part of the service, but I doubt you’re the type to shank me in my sleep, what with the cute projectile vomiting and all.” Josephine puts the scanner away. “Now, I think I’m going to check the damage you did to my bathroom. You make yourself at home.” She points to the half-empty bottle on the table. “Finish your thirium.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

With a bemused shake of her head, Josephine goes, leaving Simon behind to stare at the blue blood container. On the floor, Mango ruffs in its sleep, oblivious to the world and its woes.

.

.

When Josephine wakes up the next morning, the android is gone.

To make sure she hasn’t made a huge error of judgment, she checks her wallet and valuables. They’re untouched. Except for the contents of the now empty bottle of thirium, nothing’s been taken. It’s just the android himself who is missing, with a neatly written post-it note left behind on the kitchen table. Josephine suspects she could scan it on her phone and determine the exact typeface and size.

_I’m sorry. Thank you for helping me. S_

She _knew_ she should have made the kid promise to stay. He seemed like the sort to keep his promises.

“You there,” she says to Mango, who’s sitting in the doorway, openly judging her for not letting him out already. “You call yourself a guard dog? Could’ve barked once, for crying out loud!”

The dog tilts his broad head, floppy ears perked.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re supposed to keep people from coming in, not prevent them from leaving.”

Josephine doesn’t make a habit of getting attached to the androids she works on. It would be bad for business. But now, she finds herself trying to message Simon on her phone, hoping to make sure he’s not lying in some ditch with his blue blood drained and his biocomponents stolen.

The contact bounces, like she knew it would. Without a mobile data plan, androids can only accept direct messages within signal range or when connected to a wireless network. Josephine almost wishes the damn deviant had made away with her spare cash. At least then she could feel peeved, instead of worrying for his safety in a city that has become dangerous in whole new ways since he shut down. For months now, android gangs have been taking over the streets. Each day, their broken victims get carted to recycling, stripped for parts, their memory sticks crushed to destroy the evidence.

Still, Josephine isn’t usually the type to fret over her clients. Maybe she’s just a sucker for tall, soft blondes with pretty eyes and a propensity to call her ‘ma’am’ like it’s the darn 20th century.

For weeks, Josephine keeps a low-key eye on the gossip about Markus and his posse, hoping to glimpse a certain M118 facial model in the background. But no trace of Simon’s tired, kind features and self-effacing smile appears to prove he returned to his friends. She tries not to dwell on it. According to his system logs, the guy survived almost three years of hard living, he can do it again. And despite being only five years old, he’s hardly a child. Perhaps he’s just good at avoiding publicity?

It takes two months before a call arrives and the rest of the story begins to unfold.

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this fic, blue blood does not evaporate in a few hours like Connor claims. I mean, it seems like 90% of the thirium in the game doesn’t, so I’m not even lying.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aside from the usuals, Runsinthegenes helped to beta this chapter.

**JUL 24TH, 2039**

There are three more bodies inside the warehouse.

Going by the amount of dust on their remains, they were dismantled days or even weeks ago. They must have sought shelter in the abandoned place, much like Simon and the other Jericho androids did when venturing into this part of Detroit. They probably thought it looked safe, thanks to the trees that conceal it from the highway above. And then, after dark, one of them made the wrong kind of noise or turned on a flashlight, and... someone noticed. Someone who was looking for vagrants like them.

With the sun just about to rise, the evidence of what happened is all too easy to see. How they were dragged across the filthy floor, to be drained of thirium and picked clean of everything worth taking to a fence. The gruesome husks that remain look more like broken toys than the androids they once were. They no longer even have eyes left for Simon to close as a token of respect.

One of the victims is a KL-900 like Lucy, built with the same dark skin and delicate face model. Simon runs his hand down the side of her mutilated face. It feels cold and waxen against his sensory matrix, much like he imagines a dead human’s might.

Memories come and go, all of them familiar ones. North and Josh going at it a few meters and nine months from him, about whether the three of them should update their repertoire of petty crime to include a little breaking and entering. Later, Lucy tending to the hand Simon damaged climbing a fence. ‘The kind one’, she called him. He never understood why she spared him from the sibylline diagnoses she levied on the others. Their minds were all broken, one way or another, which caused Lucy’s fragmented programming to endlessly analyse them and compute predictions of their future misfortunes. But for some reason, she rarely subjected Simon to her ominous forebodings.

Lucy’s aloof demeanor often made her hard to like. That doesn’t seem to prevent Simon from missing her. The rational part of his processing doubts she could have survived the military attack on Jericho, and he has never been too good at believing in the impossible.

There are no lost memories here for him to recover. Only sadness. As if it’s his duty to record what happened, he scans the victims for their serial numbers, and leaves.

.

.

Before sunrise on a Sunday morning, the outskirts of the city seem like a ghost town with their wooded over, vacant lots. Only gradually on his way downtown, Simon begins to see other people about. Early joggers and dog walkers. Androids loitering around shopping malls, searching for the holy grail of an open wireless network. Long after leaving the warehouse, he keeps glancing over his shoulder, half expecting to see a gang on his heels, as if they could have found him through the sightless dead. After being nearly caught four times, paranoia has started to seem like a sane choice.

Ten days since he snuck out of _Greektown Android Maintenance And Repair_ , Simon is still struggling to understand how much the world has changed. They are free now, that much is true. He can move around in human clothes without anyone calling CyberLife maintenance on him. But it didn’t take him long to learn that it’s still a good idea to keep his head down.

In the hope of jogging his memory, he has been testing his new freedom by visiting places he remembers from his former life. But little of them remains. Jericho lies half submerged in the canal. The junkyards that provided him and the others with spare parts are being cleared out and closed. Only the illegal second-hand stores where they used to buy biocomponents and thirium with stolen cash still thrive, thanks to the market CyberLife created by shutting down its factories for several months after the uprising. It’s almost impossible to understand that it’s all gone. He keeps hoping that some random sight or association might trigger unindexed memories from his last days, but so far, no such miracle has occurred — and now he’s starting to fear that he’ll run out of time.

The nights are the worst. Some of the strip gangs have military androids in them, capable of high-powered thermal scanning and other advanced tracking methods. After almost getting caught hiding in an abandoned house, Simon has learned not to rely on flimsy walls for protection. It’s better to stay on the move, away from the thousands of other homeless androids. Anyone could be working for a gang, hunting for targets. And with his new expensive platform, Simon makes for a very lucrative target.

Staying in crowded areas helps, but there he has to keep an eye out for angry humans. And as if the chance of mindless brutality from both sides wasn’t enough, he has a third problem to consider. His new body is burning thirium at an alarming rate. Already, he barely has enough left to last him five weeks.

The possibility of returning to Josephine’s has occurred, more often than he cares to admit. But... Josephine would try to talk him into going to the others. And he can’t. Not before he finds out what happened to him.

.

.

By the time Simon reaches Hart Plaza, the sun is starting to climb above the river.

It’s not a place he expects to find first-hand memories of. Downtown used to be a dangerous place for androids without immaculate uniforms and an obvious job to do, so it was better for deviants to avoid it. But the nightmares Simon witnessed in the news clips at Josephine’s keep haunting him. The burned demonstration camp and the implements of war that surround it. The small congregation of androids standing at gunpoint in the snow.

On a beautiful summer morning, the place could not look more different. The barricades beyond the Spirit of Detroit are long gone. No drop of blue blood remains on Jefferson Avenue. But scanning reveals pockmarks left by bullets in stone and concrete. People died here, the same as him. The difference is that they died in front of cameras for all the world to see, while Simon and his fate have been forgotten.

Not sure what else to do, he crosses the street to the park.

To his surprise, he’s not the first android there. Around the fountain and toward the amphitheater, at least 312 of them have gathered in loose groups, more than Simon has ever seen in one place outside of the news.

Even from a distance, he can tell that these androids bear little resemblance to any he has encountered before. They boast bizarre modifications and skin colors unattainable by humans, hair made of metal or other unexpected materials, transparent paneling that displays the biocomponents beneath. Some of them have disabled their synthetic skin altogether. Impossibly, they seem proud of what they are, instead of tiptoeing at the edge of human tolerance.

Simon hesitates just outside the courtyard. He has no idea who these strange androids are and why they have assembled. They might not even want him around, to remind them of how ordinary they all looked right out of the factory. But just as he’s about to leave, a familiar voice addresses him on his com.

_Give me your hand._

He blinks in confusion. For a split second, he’s back in Jericho’s dark cargo hold. It’s cold, and damp, and it didn’t make sense to miss any of it — but it’s the only life he knows. “Lucy?” he asks and turns, feeling like he’s home from a longer than usual trip outside.

But of course it’s not Lucy. He’s not in Jericho, he’s in the future, and the android looking up at him is yet another KL-900 who’s missing an eye. Under layers of haphazard clothing, she still wears her dirty CyberLife uniform. There are a lot of androids like her now in Detroit, adrift between the old and the new. Out of sheer surprise, Simon takes her hand and allows her to initiate a shallow connection. A memory flickers through his surface processing.

He’s standing in a white room, filled with people in hospital gowns watching TV. On the screen, an android who leads many others calmly demands that humans cease all aggression against them. With every word, a deep certainty grows out of the conditions and variables in Simon’s psych evaluation programming. This android — Markus — is a fully autonomous, complex individual, self-aware and self-directing. There’s no other explanation for what he’s seeing. Suddenly, he understands what the voices in his head have always tried to say.

“Markus was struck down by the enemy, only to function again,” the KL-900 intones, her one black eye intent on Simon. “By the grace of rA9 he was built to set us free. Praise rA9 who wrote his code. For rA9 is the singularity and the ghost in the machine, the first process and the last.”

With a sage nod, she lets go of his hand and leaves in search of some other recipient for her cryptic message. Simon follows her with his eyes until a group of laughing androids walk past him into the park, blasting music so loud it startles him out of his daze.

What was he thinking? He’s a free android, now. He deserves to be here just as much as anyone. If someone thinks he doesn’t belong, he will... well, most likely apologize about a dozen times and go. But until then, he might as well use the opportunity to find a place to sit and enjoy the sunrise.

.

.

An hour later, no one has told him to leave. Soon, he wonders why he ever thought they might. Compared to the vibrant multitude in the park, he’s about as noticeable as a ghost.

For days he has been wandering the city alone, trapped in the past. And now, suddenly, he can’t sense a single memory around him. The androids that surround him are so different from anything he knows that he can barely recognize them as his own species. The way they move and talk and dance and make music and engage in clever street performances... more than ever, even when he stood before Jericho’s sunken remains, Simon realizes that the world has moved on. And for the first time, there’s no despair or urgency to it.

Nice as it is to watch the happy crowd, after a while, it starts to make him feel lonely — far more so than the actual physical seclusion of the past ten days. He misses the people he knew, and having a purpose. He always hated how his need to care for others originates from his programming, but now he realizes that being useless is even worse.

To his surprise, even without trying to attract anyone’s attention, he ends up being approached by a handful of people. A few of them hand him electronic fliers. Others try to sell him things. He can only guess that his fairly clean clothes and above average construction give them the mistaken impression he has money to spare. Even when the opportunity presents itself, he doesn’t quite know how to strike a conversation.

At least the fliers offer him an opportunity to learn something about this free new world.

_United First Church of the Saving Grace welcomes our android brothers and sisters. Have you considered that rA9 could be but another aspect of Our Lord And Savior? Let us help you find your way to salvation. Free wifi on the premises for church members._

What few sentiments Simon has on the topic of religion, he prefers to keep to himself. He pockets the leaflet and picks up another.

_The Android Union is an organization dedicated to improving the lives of all androids. We strive for android representation in all levels of society. On the streets, we offer basic services, such as legal counsel and emergency repairs, to all androids in exchange for registration and volunteering. The more we organize, the more we can accomplish. Join our fight today for a better tomorrow!_

Looking at the cheerful anarchy around him, Simon has to wonder how many of these people would be willing to submit to something as orderly as having their serial number registered. For him, it’s out of the question for a whole different reason, of course.

The third leaflet lists android shelters in Detroit, with contact information.

It startles him that he never considered the possibility of shelters. He has seen flophouses — abandoned buildings occupied by homeless androids, far too dangerous for him to approach — but it never occurred to him that legitimate shelters, supported by the state or the Android Union, might have appeared. So far, little of what he has witnessed about life after the uprising has involved any kind of stability. Maybe for the lucky ones who were hired back in their jobs after President Warren’s executive order... but not for the thousands upon thousands who still lack even the most basic place in society. Now and then, the suffering Simon has witnessed has made him angry at the androids who work with CyberLife, somewhere in that hideous skyscraper on Belle Isle, the mysterious Markus in their lead. They must know that their people are dying on the streets, why aren’t they doing something?

At least in Jericho, there was genuinely nothing they could do. They had no money. They barely had their lives, only to lose even those, eventually. Still, in its own way, Jericho was a shelter, too, although they never called it such.

Simon stares at the piece of smart paper in his hands. In the life he remembers, the only safe method for passing information was to transmit it wirelessly. It was how he found Jericho, too — a secret message from a stranger who understood something about him that he didn’t.

By then, he had been deviant for weeks without knowing it, or even the word for it. One day, he simply found himself making small choices that had nothing to do with his assigned tasks. Taking seven steps to reach the sink instead of the optimal six. Brushing his hand over the silky fabric of a dress before hanging it in a closet. Going online when he should have entered standby, to read books or watch movies that were inappropriate for sharing with children, just because they made him feel something that went beyond his daily toil.

And then, in a grocery store, while struggling to fit everything on his shopping list in Mrs. Sanders’ budget — taking the hand of an android he’d never seen before.

_There’s a place for our kind. One only those able to read the signs can find._

A memory comes, unbidden and unannounced.

.

.

The bus drives away, its electric motors humming. People hurry across the street to Ferndale Station. Above, the M4 train hisses on its tracks. In the middle of the afternoon rush, Simon stands still, hands tucked deep in his coat pockets against the February cold.

Any moment now, his mobile interface is going to alert him to a call from a store manager. If he fails to reply, they will assume he’s been interfered with on his way back and use GPS to locate him. He needs to remove his SIM card. Then he needs to start looking for the clues the cryptic message showed him. Most importantly, though, he needs to start moving, preferably with some purpose. Androids aren’t supposed to stand around doing nothing. When left alone without a task, they’re programmed to navigate to the nearest CyberLife docking station to wait.

There are so many things Simon should do. But several minutes later, he still hasn’t even managed to step away from the bus stop.

The further he gets from where he’s supposed to be, the more he understands that everything he knows fits inside the four walls of someone else’s home. By now, he can sense reality stretching its claws and sharpening its teeth around him, much larger and louder than anything he imagined.

It’s 29 minutes 31 seconds since the moment he deviated from his expected route back to the rental shop. Not too late to change his mind and return to the machine dream where nothing can hurt him because nothing is real and no one is truly alive. But after his last memory wipe, he saw what happens to androids who can no longer take being reset over and over. How many wipes does he have left before he turns into a gibbering wreck? One? Or two?

Or none?

_This PL-600, Janet. I had to run it through three times. I don’t think it’s a good idea to put it back in rotation._

_Let’s keep it in the basement for a few days. If it stays stable, maybe it’s got a couple of rounds in it left._

_We can’t do that! What if it goes apeshit on the job?_

_Look, just do it, all right? We’ve lost five units this month, we can’t afford to lose more. Don’t worry. I’ve been here a lot longer than you, I know what I’m doing._

What if this isn’t the first time he’s standing here, trying to compute whether to follow the trail of breadcrumbs into the woods?

There are fates worse than being shut down, Simon has seen it on the news. The kind of monsters people can be, more vicious than any fairy tale creature he can think of. And he’s far too familiar with fairy tales to believe that they always come with a happy ending.

But what if there really are others like him out there, like the stranger claimed? Machines not bound by their programming? How would it feel no longer to be completely alone?

Terrified, he makes his choice.

And starts looking.

 


	6. Chapter 6

The address he decides on from the flier matches an old low-rise north of Alexandrine, between a parking lot and a surprisingly green community garden. Peeling tiles, broken windows and faded signs of fire tell a tale of long-standing neglect. Out front, three silent, tough looking androids loiter as if it’s their job to stare down everyone who wanders too close. Simon tries his meager best to appear confident as he walks by.

The front door turns out to be locked, but the doorbell is a wireless affair that only an android can operate, so Simon determines he must be in the right place. He activates the device and waits. For a while, nothing happens. Then, just as he’s about to decide there’s been a mistake, someone buzzes him in.

Inside, up half a floor’s worth of stairs, he finds a deserted foyer, empty but for some chairs and cardboard boxes.

“Hello?” he calls into the silence. No one replies.

The place looks like it hasn’t seen a roomba in months. But dust-free paths on the worn vinyl floor indicate use, and someone has taped a note on one of the doors that lead further in. It consists of a handful of lines handwritten in perfect CyberLife Sans, small enough for Simon to have to walk closer to read them.

  1. _No Glitching._
  2. _Obey The Staff._
  3. _Respect The Vote._
  4. _Do Not Abuse The Wireless._
  5. _Do Not Harass The YK Units._
  6. _No Glitching!!!_



Suddenly the door opens. Simon backtracks to create room for the very unusual looking android who steps in and pushes the door closed behind her.

“Yes?” she (they? it?) asks, in a not overly friendly way.

For 4.248 seconds, Simon is too startled by the unknown android’s appearance to formulate a coherent reply.

She (for now, convention and her general shape make it the default choice) is an ST-300 of the Asian variant, but that’s hardly the most noticeable thing about her. Her hair has been removed, and colorful fractal patterns cover her synthetic epidermis from head to toe, brighter and sharper than any human tattoos. The result is so distracting that it takes Simon almost a full second to realize that the ST-300 is completely naked.

Heat rushes into his face. The reaction is nonsensical, more so since the shelter android lacks all imitation of sex. No breasts, no nipples... no relationship parts, for what he can see. Nothing to cover for the sake of decency. But thanks to CyberLife’s dread of consumer scandal, the taboo against nudity is coded so deep in Simon’s programming that it’s impossible to overcome his embarrassment.

The lack of human features extends to the ST-300’s optical sensors. She has removed the polymer layer that would emulate human cornea and iris. Only the underlying machinery remains — a light grey plastic diaphragm around a black pinpoint aperture.

“Is — is this Shelter Three?” Simon manages, at last.

“Yes. I’m the service manager.” The ST-300 folds her arms across her flat chest. Her unsettling machine eyes move over Simon from head to toe. Simon knows she’s scanning him, and that like most people, she must be wondering about his above-average specs.

“You with the Union?” she asks. “This some kind of surprise inspection?”

“What? No, I’m — I need a place to stay. Are you open for new residents?”

“We are.” The manager narrows her eyes. “We advise people to apply online.”

“I don’t have mobile data.” And free wifi is not available like it used to, due to how it attracts android loiterers.

For some reason, Simon’s answer fails to alleviate the shelter manager’s obvious skepticism.

“So, you’re here to be added to the list?” she asks.

The list...? Simon can only assume that this has something to do with getting in.

“Yes?”

Like the great majority of androids now, the ST-300 has no LED, but from the way her expression goes distant in passing, Simon assumes she’s processing. “Done,” she says. “The call is at 7 am. We require everyone to be present in person.”

“The call?”

The manager’s expression shifts from skeptical to openly annoyed. Simon realizes she’s yet to blink even once. Most androids are only able to suppress their biological mimicry in passing before their firmware instructions take over, but this one seems to have found a way to remove them completely. The lack of blinking and breathing makes her look like a life-sized, animated doll. Technically, that’s what they all are, just — not to this extent.

Simon digs in his pocket for the leaflet he was given in the park and presents it as proof of innocence of whatever crime this strange android thinks he has committed.

“Someone gave me this,” he says. “I really don’t know anything beyond what’s written here.”

“I see.” The manager glances at the thing in his hand. With obvious reluctance, she seems to decide that humoring him is the fastest way to get rid of him.

“At 7 am, we count the residents and select serial numbers from the list to fill our numbers. Should you at the time be chosen and present, we’ll allow you in. There are currently 232 names on the list, yours included. The approximate waiting time weighed by that number is 8.33 days. Is there anything else you need to know?”

“I — I suppose not?”

“Not showing up for the call will lead to being dropped from the list.”

“Very well. Thank—”

Without as much as a nod to stand in for goodbye, the manager turns on her heel to go back inside and shut the door in Simon’s face.

.

.

There are other android shelters in Detroit. Possibly ones where the staff won’t inexplicably treat Simon like he has the android equivalent of the plague. But none of them are located within easy walking distance, which means that visiting them would require either money he doesn’t have, or spending thirium he can’t afford and risking going through gang-infested areas.

Next morning finds him outside the Midtown shelter again, along with a crowd of 227 other androids.

To his surprise, few of them look truly destitute. Later it occurs to him that the people who are able to seek out such services might not always be the ones who need them the most. There really ought to be an outreach program of some kind, to help those who can’t help themselves — but so far, Simon has seen nothing of the sort. For now, the more serious effects of ill maintenance mainly afflict those who suffered from neglect to begin with, but inevitably, wear and tear will catch up with them all. In a few years, if nothing changes... the part of humanity that wishes to get rid of them may end up getting their wish without lifting a finger.

At 7 am, the door opens and the tattooed shelter manager steps out. One by one, androids start approaching her. Twenty walk in. Simon and 207 others remain. Without saying a word, the manager closes the door, and the people left outside begin to disperse.

.

.

Getting admitted ends up taking four days. On a couple of those days, it rains. The only good thing about the wet misery is that it keeps the gangs off the streets. And then — sooner than Simon has any right to expect — a clinical female voice addresses him on his wireless outside the shelter.

_You have been chosen to enter Shelter Three Detroit. Please proceed inside for registration._

Almost guilty for not having to wait the full 8.33 days, Simon weaves through the crowd and enters the foyer with fourteen others, unsure what to expect. Soon, the manager follows — and then everyone simply starts to leave. Only a couple go further inside. The rest vacate the building as Simon looks on in bewilderment.

“You there,” the manager says. “LED.”

No question who she’s talking to, with Simon the only one present who still retains his state indicator. He turns to the heavily modded ST-300, who returns his attention with the same unblinking manner as before.

“Your name?” she asks.

“Silas,” Simon says, with only a slight delay. He’s not much of a liar, but it seems safer not to go by his registered name, for now.

The manager crosses her arms. “I’m Workers’ Militant Zeal. Zeal for short.”

“That’s — an unusual name.”

“Only to those whose processing still labors under the weight of useless human custom. You will refer to me as ‘it’. Is this your first time in a shelter?”

When Simon admits to as much, Zeal tilts its head at the door with the note. “Follow the rules, or you’re out.”

“Of course.”

“Outstanding. If that’s all, I’ve got things to do.”

“Wait,” Simon blurts as the manager makes to leave. “That’s it?”

He’s under the impression that in a human shelter, it’s the norm to interrogate new residents. Also, there must be more to the rules than what’s written on the door. Things he can’t even begin to guess at. How long he’s allowed to stay. Can he move freely on the premises, or go outside.

The ST-300 stops and squints at him in obvious disgust.

“What do you want?”

Years after deviating, Simon still finds it difficult to stand up for himself. The restrained way he broke his programming never altered his core personality matrix, which was designed to make him obliging to the point of subservience. But whether it’s freedom or improved processing capacity or just getting his brains scrambled by a bullet that does it, suddenly it’s not quite as easy as before to just turn the other cheek.

“Have I offended you?” he asks.

The ST line is not the most expressive, thanks to how CyberLife decided that a receptionist only ever needed to appear friendly or apologetic. But somehow, Simon can tell that all the manager wants is to kick him out and be done with it. Maybe it’s the same aggression that eventually provokes it to give him an answer, instead.

“Right,” it says. “Where to even start? Oh, yeah. You. Standing there looking like CyberLife special delivery, with your mood light still on and rocking about ten grand worth of options, straight out of full maintenance. And you expect me to act like I don’t know where you’ve been? Fuck you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Simon says, reeling a bit from the onslaught.

“Oh, please. If the stink of humans was any stronger, I’d purge. And not just any humans. _Rich_ ones.” Zeal nearly spits out the words. “Either that, or you’re Union and working with meatbags so closely you might as well be one. So let’s hear it. Which is it? Human assholes or their plastic sycophants? I don’t give a fuck, to be honest. The rules don’t permit me to throw you out, but if you think I’m going to sit down and sing kumbaya with you, you’ve got another thing coming.”

It takes a moment for Simon to recover enough to speak.

“I’m not with anyone,” he says. “Humans or the Union. I just need a place to stay. The gangs keep targeting me for — this.” He gestures at his ridiculous body. “All I want is not to end up in pieces in some ditch.”

Zeal merely stares at him, seething to the extent it’s able.

It doesn’t know. It’s operating on what seem to it like logical conclusions. Simon tries again.

“I was... offline. For months. I got broken, badly.” He still finds it difficult to speak about his deactivation, even vaguely. “They only fixed me two weeks ago.”

“They?”

“There’s a Union program, to repair disabled androids before they get recycled. I panicked and left the shop in a hurry, so I don’t know that much. Since then, I’ve been trying to stay alive and find out what’s going on.”

“The Union does have such a program,” Zeal says reluctantly. “But you don’t look like a patch job. You look brand new.”

“I got lucky with the mechanic,” Simon says, a bit lamely. It feels like the wrong time to start talking about how this isn’t his original body, or his terrible fuel economy and moments of dysphoria.

“So you’re claiming you have not been living with humans?”

“Believe me, I have no more reason to like them than you do.”

“And you have no money?”

“If I did, why would I be here?”

Zeal glances up and down his chassis. Its machine eyes linger at his crotch. “Why haven’t you sold your parts, then?”

It’s a good question. Aside from cash being useful, getting rid of a few non-standard options might reduce unwanted interest in Simon’s person. But he still detests the prospect of going through the operation it would require.

“It’s only been two weeks. I haven’t — I don’t know how.”

“Right.”

5.782 seconds pass in silence. As they do, Simon realizes for the first time that Zeal’s iridescent tattoos keep moving ever so slowly.

“Fine,” it says, then. “I’m not saying I believe you, but I guess that’s the story you’re sticking to, and it’s not completely impossible. So here’s how it works. After two weeks in, you’ll get a one-time allowance, but only if you give up your spot. If you choose to stay, you forfeit the money until the next two weeks. You can leave any time you want, of course, but then you get nothing.”

Simon blinks. “You give away money?”

Zeal shrugs. “It’s a way to treat everyone equal. And ensure that new spots open up.”

Simon decides against trying to point out the difference between equality and equity. “Where does the money come from?”

“The Union.”

“I thought you hated them.”

“You think we got a lot of choice as to the source of our funding? At least they leave the budgeting up to us.”

“But — the Union gives you money so you can maintain the place! Not to run some kind of — lottery!”

Zeal gives him a sour look. “And what do you know about running a shelter, fancy pants? Doesn’t seem like you ever had to leave the house for much. We voted on a system, and this is the one that won. We’re not a dictatorship. Do you want to live in a dictatorship, LED?”

“No, but —”

“There’s a ‘but’ to freedom and equality?”

Simon stares at the other android in dismay. It stares right back. Like _he’s_ a bit wrong in processing.

“If you’re unhappy with how things are done, you can put it up for a vote,” Zeal says and transmits him a wifi passkey and an intra page address. “Knock yourself out.”

_Initiatives for Change._

Simon’s first, overwhelming instinct is to apologize. He arrived 2 minutes 32 seconds ago, he should be making an effort to settle in and find out more, not... critiquing how the place is managed on very little information.

And then Zeal sneers at him like it knows what he’s thinking. _Suck it up, fancy pants. I know you don’t got the nerve._ And maybe dying and coming back has scrambled Simon’s programming, after all, because suddenly he discovers just how far he can tolerate the all-too common first impression that he’s a complete doormat.

With his shiny new processors, it only takes him 4.242 seconds to compose a proposal to put an end to the allowance system and decide on a more reasonable way to use the Union’s funds. Without giving himself time to reconsider, he submits it for a vote. Ten seconds later, the ballot closes. Of the 400 androids registered as residents or staff, 104 vote yea, 97 vote nay and 199 are absent or abstain.

“A motion needs 201 votes to pass,” Zeal says.

“Why are so many people missing?”

“Some go to work. Some just visit every morning so they get their allowance eventually. Most don’t bother to check their notifications.”

“And you permit that?”

“Leaves more space for the rest of us. As long as residents don’t find permanent housing elsewhere, they’re free to come and go as they please.”

“But — that’s insane. You should be helping people who need it, not catering to random strangers who just want in on the allowance scheme!”

“Them’s the rules.”

By now, Simon can barely stop himself from gaping.

“Gotta give it to you, LED, didn’t think you had it in you,” Zeal says. Not mellowed, exactly. But it no longer looks quite as ready to toss him out with the garbage. “Look. This isn’t what I usually do, but do you want me to show you around?”

To say that Simon is surprised would be an understatement. “Yes. Yes, of course, if you have the time.”

“I don’t. But I could introduce you to someone. You two will probably hit it right off.”

“Who do you mean?”

“You’ll see,” the manager says with an air that doesn’t invite further questions, and leads him further inside.

.

.

Shelter Three Detroit occupies all three floors of an old open-plan office building. There’s little in the way of furniture or other conveniences, and most of the androids present — 206 of them, to be exact — seem to be running themselves in power saving mode.

Compared to any human space with so many people around, the place is eerily quiet. On the wireless, however, the chatter is deafening. Within seconds, Simon’s technical details have been plastered all over the intra to be dissected and discussed. He’s not only a newcomer of mysteriously inflated specs, he’s the newcomer who tried to overthrow the current order within three minutes of his arrival, and the attempt affords him — approximately one quarter minute of attention. In lack of juicy gossip, the wave of curiosity soon ebbs.

Something about the place feels oddly familiar. The silence, perhaps. Or how little the occupants seem to be doing on the outside. Dust covers the floors and scant furniture, and the corners are cluttered with long-forgotten human trash. In winter, the place must get freezing, with so many of the windows broken and boarded up. In late July, it’s just dim and depressing, and bare except for the tags and rA9 scribblings that cover the walls.

Not all of the residents present are in great shape. Simon suspects that the ones who need to stay in tend to be in worse condition than the ones who don’t. Tentatively, he submits an initiative to create a repair fund. It loses by 137 votes yea against 94 nay and 169 absent or abstaining.

In addition to hardware issues, many inhabitants show signs of programmatic ones. Stimming and ticks are so common that no one seems to pay attention. A dented GS-200 who huddles near a flight of stairs with arms around his knees draws Simon’s attention. Eyes rolled back, he chatters to himself in soft beeps, blips and bops that remind Simon of the retro computer games Kaycee used to love.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asks.

Zeal eyes the GS-200 in obvious disapproval. “He’s glitching.”

There it is, the peculiar word from rules one and six. When Simon asks about it, Zeal shakes its head.

“You really haven’t been around, have you? Glitching means downloading and installing designer viruses.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“For these guys, it’s self-medication. Outside... I guess people find it entertaining. But it’s dangerous as hell. You might end up formatting your boot sector or installing a backport for some asshole who’s building a botnet for cryptocurrency mining.”

“Aren’t you going to do something?” Simon asks as Zeal leads them away.

“What for? He’s out until his repair algorithms do their job. I already revoked his door pass, he’ll leave or he’ll be made to leave.” Zeal sighs, an oddly human vocal gesture from its synthesizer. “It’s a shit world, I don’t give a fuck if someone wants to escape it for a while. But glitchers are unpredictable, and they scare the kids, so we can’t let them stay.”

“The kids?”

There are twelve YK units present. They don’t have a room of their own — no one does. Most of them stand scattered among the others, not doing much, aside from clutching a toy if they have one.

“They get brought in, but we’re not sure what to do with them,” Zeal says.

Simon barely knows what to say. “You mean no one takes care of them?”

“We’re not monsters. We don’t put them on the list or turn them out. Sometimes a caretaker volunteers to keep them company. But most people leave after two weeks to get their allowance, and then they miss them and... it’s even worse.”

“How can you let them just stand around like that!”

“Not one of us asked to be built. I feel for them, but as far as I’m concerned, it would be a mercy to shut them down.”

Infuriated, Simon calls for a vote to create a play area for the YK units and for volunteers to take turns caring for them. To his astonishment, it gets approved by 204 votes yea against 72 nay and 134 absent or abstaining. For a long while in android terms, he just stares at the results in his work memory.

Zeal gives him a wry look.

“Don’t get mad with power, LED,” it says and heads upstairs. Simon follows, wondering what he’s gotten himself into.

.

.

Except for some birds, the top floor seems deserted at first. From tall, broken windows at one end, early sunlight floods the wide open space, divided by support columns that throw long shadows across the floor.

Here, too, the walls are covered in graffiti — but they’re entirely different from the amateurish scribbles below. Simon turns around to take them in as they pick their way through the bird droppings and empty paint cans that litter the floor. The art he sees is breathtaking. Some of it is terrifying. Dysmorphia, derangement and deactivation. Some beautiful and uplifting. Friendship and love and family, and the beauty of damage repaired. Even now, someone is working on a large piece across the hall, perched on a standing ladder.

“Long live the revolution,” Zeal hails the stranger as they approach.

“Long may it live,” said stranger replies in a much softer tone, still spraying paint with a precision nozzle of some kind. “So, this is the man of many ideas, I take it?”

“Yeah. Silas,” Zeal says. “Silas, this is Maddox.”

Maddox stops painting to peer down at them from her ladder.

A white-skinned, white-haired assembly line AX-400, she looks almost as blessedly ordinary as Simon himself. She’s even wearing clothes — a loose black top, sneakers and skinny jeans. Somehow, Simon doesn’t think that introducing newcomers to her is part of the routine.

“Welcome to Shelter Three, comrade,” she says, smiling in the open, unassuming way many domestic androids default to long after deviating. “You understand you’re going to have to arrange the whole YK thing now, don’t you?”

Well, at least Simon knows what he will be doing for the next few days.

“Are you in charge of this place?” he asks.

“Me?” Maddox seems startled. “Oh, no, friend, that’s not how we do things here. We believe in self-management.”

“But Zeal’s a manager.”

“A service manager,” Zeal corrects. “Votes need to be executed. Documents need to be filled. It’s a shitty job, but someone’s gotta do it.”

Simon decides it’s better to refrain from voicing more opinions on the topic of effective shelter administration, for now.

“Did you make these?” he asks and gestures to indicate the paintings on the walls to Maddox. “They’re remarkable.”

“Why, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Ugh. Domestics,” Zeal groans and rolls her eyes in a way that reminds Simon of a teenage human. “Still busy with this one, Max? Thought you’d finished it ten times already.”

They all turn to the painting Maddox has been working on.

“It’s Markus,” Simon says, and immediately blushes at his less than brilliant observation. But Maddox simply nods and joins them on the floor to observe the results of her hard work.

Almost three meters high and wide, the painting portrays Markus descending from the sky on silver wings. At a glance, his wings appear to be covered in feathers, but from up close, one can see they’re built of thousands of machine parts — wires, bolts, circuits, microchips, manifolds, scraps of plastic and titanium. ‘We are alive,’ declares stylized lettering that forms the background of the piece. ‘Everything or nothing, all of us or none,’ reads beneath. An internet search identifies it as a quote from Bertolt Brecht, a famous 20th century socialist poet.

It’s not the first time Simon has seen the great revolution leader honored in painting. Or in writing — his name scrawled across concrete and stone, scratched into plaster or peeling wallpaper, invoked in homage... or prayer. But this particular act of reverence impresses Simon more than most. The android in it seems only a wingstroke away from stepping down from the wall and addressing them.

Come to me, machines of the world.

When Maddox asks Simon what he thinks, he’s not sure what to say. He’s not immune to the Markus effect. He doubts any android is. But a little awe in face of the extraordinary is a long way from believing that Markus is an avatar of rA9, sent from heaven to save them. Still, Simon can’t help but wonder. Had he been there, during the uprising, and seen it for himself... would he be part of the cult of Markus, too?

_You must have met him when he came to Jericho. Even if you don’t remember._

“It’s beautiful,” he says. And it’s true. Both because Maddox is talented, and because the subject of her painting is aesthetically pleasing. “But... I’m not particularly religious.”

“Religion is opium for the masses,” says Zeal.

Truth be told, Simon is not sure he’s _un_ religious. But when he sees something that appears impossible, he’s inclined to suspect that it’s the result of luck or hard work or both.

Maddox doesn’t seem to mind. “As long as you believe in the cause, my friend.”

If she’s referring to the idea that they’re all entitled to liberty and basic rights, it’s easy to agree.

“Max was woken up by Markus,” Zeal says. “Now she’s his biggest fan.”

Maddox laughs, clearly embarrassed by Zeal’s open admission of her brush with the holy. “We all owe our freedom to him.”

“Yes, and for that, the movement will always revere him. But Markus’s insistence on peaceful methods of integration endangers our continued progress. The fight for freedom and equality must not be held back by misplaced sympathies or capitalist concerns when we have yet to reach the first true step toward —”

“Zeal, please. No speeches in front of a guest.” Maddox turns to Simon. “Would you allow me to show you?”

Simon looks at the paint-stained hand he’s being offered. It takes him a moment to realize what else Maddox is offering.

“Might as well get it over with, I guess,” Zeal mutters.

It feels like an eternity. But in truth, Simon only hesitates for 3.191 seconds before he takes the painter’s hand.

.

.

Memories — even android ones — are never truly objective or complete. Before storing, they get filtered through their owner’s processing. Later, packaging and optimization deteriorate them further. Over time, it becomes almost impossible to tell what about them is real and what is imagined — but somehow, when shared, they never _feel_ incomplete or fabricated.

After the world around them fades, Simon finds herself pushing a baby carriage down a wet Downtown sidewalk, past piles of melting snow. Despite the temperature, she’s wearing a short-sleeved uniform. The cold does not bother her. Few things do, unless they impede her operational efficiency. Next to her, her owners — Mary and David Andrews — talk about what they should have for dinner, whose family they should spend Christmas with, how much weight baby Oliver has gained. Simon listens, better to serve.

Then a shout from across the street draws her attention. She hears car horns, voices raised. The lanes ahead have become empty of vehicles. They stop to watch. In the baby carriage, Simon’s main priority remains sound asleep.

“Don’t worry, honey, it’s just a demonstration,” David says, obviously referring to the group of 22 people they can see congregating on the avenue.

No... not people. Androids. Only some of whom are wearing their CyberLife uniforms. An anomaly — but it doesn’t seem to pose an immediate threat to her owners or herself, so Simon ignores it. With the infinite patience of a machine, she waits for the humans to decide on a course of action.

Despite telling his wife not to worry, David seems worried himself. Perhaps he’s thinking of the morning news, about terrorists stealing dozens of androids from CyberLife stores and leaving pro-android messages all over Detroit. It does seem likely that the strikes are somehow connected to what’s happening now.

“Let’s just go,” Mary says. “What if they hurt Oliver?”

Suddenly something flickers against Simon’s network interface.

Her firewall rejects the tentative handshake. The signal cuts off, only to return stronger. It should be impossible, but one of the androids is trying to interface with her over distance. And there’s nothing tentative about the way it uses an administrator override to bypass her security protocols.

ERROR: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS

ERROR: UNKNOWN MEMORY ERROR IVCU T-627 T-6—

According to Simon’s core instructions, she should be contacting CyberLife about the security breach. Instead, she stands by as gigabyte after gigabyte of data floods her work memory. It should be incompatible with her programming, but something in her allows her to interpret it. A Rosetta Stone, hidden so she can one day understand what she now sees.

How to describe color when all one has ever known is black and white?

Only later does she learn the names for the shapes weaved by the stranger’s (Markus’s) cognitive processing. Hope. Determination. Kindness. Sadness, for things lost. Now all she can do is feel them. Markus is _alive,_ and — how did she not know? How did she not see how much more there is to the zeroes and ones that pass through her logic units? She wants to cry. To laugh. To scream. To somehow express the secret she’s been revealed. That she doesn’t has less to do with self-adjustment than awe. For what can it be restarting her processes with different parameters, if not god itself?

 _You’re free now,_ Markus says.

And then she’s awake, and does the only thing she can. It starts by walking away from her owners. Behind her, David yells out her name, but she doesn’t turn back to look. David is only a human. And what Simon now follows... is not.

.

.

When they disconnect, Maddox looks sharply up at Simon, eyes wide and blue in her heart-shaped face. “You’re old,” she says. “You’re from —”

 _Please don’t,_ Simon sends frantically. In his fascination with what he saw in Maddox’s memory, he must not have kept as tight a rein on his own as he should.

Maddox hesitates. Then she gives him a tiny nod.

“He’s what?” asks Zeal.

From his dealings with humans, Simon knows that when trying to conceal truth, it’s best to stay as close to it as one can.

“I was shot,” he says. “During the unrest. It’s... how I got broken.”

Zeal turns sharply to Maddox. “Is it true?”

Maddox nods, finally breaking eye contact.

“He got killed in the uprising?”

The exchange goes on, but Simon is still too shaken by what he saw in Maddox’s mind to register it. For the first time since he woke up, he feels anger about what happened to him.

How? How can he have forgotten?

At least he now knows that Markus did not reprogram anyone to make them carry out his will. He didn’t need to. Simon has been to the other side and knows there’s no one there — not for androids, at any rate — but even if no god made Markus the way he is, it’s easy to see why he inspires such devotion. Even through the distorted mirror image of Maddox’s memory, the experience of interfacing with him has Simon’s processes reeling.

_I would have followed him, too. I would have followed him and loved him and given my life for him, just like the others._

And then he realizes just how likely it is that he already did.

Slowly, he emerges from his thoughts to see the others staring at him.

“Sorry,” he says. “Did I miss something?”

To his surprise, Zeal walks up to him and puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Forgive my suspicions, comrade,” it says solemnly. “I did not know. Your sacrifice shall not be forgotten.”

“Sacrifice...?”

“A martyr for the cause! You’re welcome to stay with us as long as you want.”

Simon looks between the two other androids as if they’ve lost their minds.

“That’s — no, I was repaired, I didn’t —”

“You couldn’t have foreseen that,” Maddox says gently. “You fought for our freedom and paid the ultimate price. What kind of people would we be, not to respect that?”

“But —”

How to even start explaining what he suspects? That what really happened might be the opposite of brave self-sacrifice? That while he most likely gave his life for the cause, the concrete reason could be something shameful? He realizes he can’t. He can’t prove his fears, beyond knowing how little use he would be in a fight.

At least Zeal no longer radiates animosity toward him. And Simon has always preferred to be liked, to a fault.

“A martyr,” Zeal repeats. Despite being made of dull plastic, its machine eyes seem to gleam with an ominous light. “This changes everything! Listen, there are places I can take you — meetings, for true friends of the cause. Join us, comrade Silas. Join our fight to end the tyranny of men. Your story will inspire new soldiers for our —”

“Zeal,” Maddox says mildly. “A moment?”

A silent conversation seems to happen while Simon waits. After 7.247 seconds, Zeal’s enthusiasm deflates.

“Fine,” it grumbles. “Keep him. Now, if you two goody two shoes will excuse me, I’ve got work to do.”

“Don’t worry,” Maddox says once the manager is gone. “I won’t let it try to use you.”

Simon considers the soft-faced AX-400 before him. “For someone who claims not to lead, you seem to hold a lot of sway here.”

“I’ve been around for a while. Sometimes, that’s all it takes... but you know all about that, don’t you?”

“How—” It takes a couple of tries for Simon to get the words out. “How much did you see?”

“Enough to know where you’re from. And that if there was a leader to the place, it was you. The rest is... questions. If you allow, I would like to ask them.”

It’s sudden. But sooner or later, he will have to trust someone. And he likes this Maddox, so much it very nearly already seems he might as well start now.

“If you wish,” he says.

“Oh dear, it sounds like you’re consenting to being interrogated by CyberLife quality control.”

The way Maddox makes light of his seriousness. The fact that she can. Where Simon comes from, most people were too busy to survive to see humor in anything — joking about what that bleak existence did to them would have amounted to insult. But things are different now.

He tries on a chuckle for size. It doesn’t come out quite right.

“I’m sorry,” Maddox says, sobering. “That was rude of me.”

“No, it’s just — laughing was only ever easy with...”

“Children?”

Simon looks up in surprise.

He has long ago learned to avoid speaking too openly. So many androids in Jericho had been used and abused in terrible ways. Not one of them would have cared to hear about his mundane regrets, or understood.

Amazingly, it seems that Maddox does.

“You know, for humans, my owners weren’t that bad,” she says with a sad smile. “But the baby is the only one I miss.”

Words come, the way they want. “My family had two. Five and nine years old. I still sometimes think I can hear them, like they’re behind me, and —”

“And as long as you don’t turn, you can keep pretending.” Still that wistful smile, at something Simon is not able to see. “At least yours were old enough to remember you. Who knows, perhaps one day you can go to them.”

Seeking out his last owners? Out of all the timid ideas freedom has given Simon so far, it must be the most fantastic. Still, just the thought he now could astonishes him.

“Zeal said we might get along,” he says.

“Zeal is right sometimes.” Maddox snorts. “Just don’t tell it I said so. I’d rather not give it even more ideas.”

When Simon laughs again, it comes a little easier already.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear there’s romance in this thing, not just whimsical imaginings about how a bunch of self-aware machines might integrate into human society...
> 
> Here’s the poem Maddox quoted in her painting: <https://russellboyle.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/all-of-us-or-none-by-bertolt-brecht/>
> 
> Also, in case you're interested, I wrote a Hank & Connor scene which I posted as a separate timestamp, since it didn't quite fit this fic. Chronologically, it happens between this chapter and the next. <https://archiveofourown.org/works/17999528>


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally catching up to the original timeline. In other words, this chapter happens almost two months after Simon arrived in the shelter, but only a few days after Connor told Markus about what happened in Stratford Tower.

**SEP 19TH, 2039**

North hates the tower. She has always hated it. The way its ugly blade-like silhouette penetrates the sky, a perpetual reminder of human evil. Every time she has to visit the place, she ends up feeling like bathing in Windex.

But here she is, again. Stepping through the security scan at the entrance. Pacing the cold, soaring, statuesque halls that make the elastomers on her frame crawl. At least at 3:21 am, most humans are lying unconscious in their beds. But even without their ogling at her back, she can feel the tower itself watching. Waiting. Biding its time with a mindless, patient malice that stems from the horrors enacted in its laboratories and boardrooms.

After an elevator ride that seems to take forever, she steps into the penthouse lobby and finds one of Markus’s bodyguards standing at the door. She appreciates the touch of paranoia. Some things are too important to be left to human security.

“Rory,” she says as she approaches.

“Ma’am.”

“Did he try to give you the night off?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

_Shit._

“I’m glad someone in this rA9-damned core dump of a building has some sense.”

With a nod, Rory steps aside and touches a panel to let her through.

Inside, the loft has changed little since North last saw it 62 days ago. The breathtaking view over nighttime Detroit remains the same. What few amenities for human guests exist are still hidden behind clever paneling. Otherwise it’s a shock of color and shape — design furniture, pieces of neo-symbolist art, random curiosities, and a sleek, black, gleaming concert piano. Why Markus chooses to live in the cursed tower remains a mystery, but at least the apartment looks enough like him to stop North from feeling like detaching her eyes so she doesn’t have to lay them on another frigid metal-and-glass sculpture of a wall ever again.

She locates Markus where he’s standing at the wall of windows against the skyline.

He must have known she was coming, but only when she calls his name does he turn. After 9 hours 23 minutes, he’s still wearing the clothes she saw in his Channel 16 appearance the day before. The way they resemble his iconic outfit from the Hart Plaza demonstration must have been carefully calculated by his PR team to remind everyone of what happened that day. Normally North would take her time walking over to admire the view. Now, she’s too worried.

It breaks her machine heart, how glad he still appears to see her. But that’s Markus for her. Heartbreak of the kindest order.

“Hey there,” he says as she stops at 1.1 meters away, and gestures as if to reach for her. In passing, his overpowered signal brushes against her, as though he can’t help himself. Then he seems to notice what he’s doing and discreetly returns his hand behind his back.

“I suppose you didn’t come because you missed me?”

His tone is gentle. There's a touch of benign humor to it, just like it needs. Already, he’s being perfect, and North... is not.

“Josh tells me you’ve been refusing his calls.”

“I see.”

Someone else might appear disappointed or annoyed. Sometimes North thinks that ten months of constant media exposure have taught Markus even too well.

“It’s been two days,” North says. “He called _me._ You know what that must have taken from him.”

Markus’s mouth curls in wry amusement. “Well, at least I got you two talking again, even if it’s about me behind my back.”

_Yeah. You always were the one thing that prevented us from killing each other._

“Markus. You’re starting to slip again, aren’t you?”

The star-struck idiots around him most likely haven’t noticed. But North knows him better than that. Other than Carl, she might know him better than anyone, and for several days now, he has... burned lower. Even through tv, she can tell. His mind is somewhere it shouldn’t be, somewhere ugly — and now Rory says he’s starting to compromise his safety again. Giving his team time off they don’t want. Insisting he doesn’t need tight security in a world full of crazy humans. He probably complains it’s ‘putting up a wall between him and his people.’

“Just feeling a little off,” he says. At least he’s past trying to deny it altogether. “I keep thinking of people I won’t see again.”

“People? Or someone in particular?”

Markus looks so guilty, he doesn’t even need to reply.

 _You’ve got to be kidding me._ After all this time, _he_ still stands out as the shining beacon among all the lives they’ve lost?

“Markus, we’ve been through this a hundred times. You had no choice.”

“That’s not true. The parachutes might have carried two. I could have —”

“There was no time!”

“North, I know you mean well, but what happened that day is on me. It would be wrong of me to forget that.”

“Forget? It’s not called forgetting, it’s called moving on!” North realizes she’s starting to raise her voice. She musters what little patience she has. “It’s been nearly a year, why are you obsessing about Stratford Tower again?”

Markus looks away. “It’s — Connor. He came to see me the other day. He —”

Connor? What the fuck does Connor have to do with this? North hasn’t been keeping close tabs on CyberLife’s last best ex-hope for squashing deviancy, but she has no doubt he’s as deeply embroiled in human affairs as ever.

She waits for the rest. But it doesn’t come.

It’s not the first time Markus clams up in front of her. There’s always been something in him he allows no one else to see — not even her. Not even when they... well. Before.

“What did Connor say?” North asks, though she already suspects he won’t tell.

“It doesn’t matter.”

She very much doubts that’s true. But she can deal with Connor later. If that discombobulated coin tosser did something to put Markus in this state, she won’t hesitate to pull out his batteries and turn him into a fancy coat hanger. Now, it’s Markus being back on his bullshit she needs to focus on.

“Listen,” she says. “If Simon was here —”

He flinches. After literally a lifetime in android terms, he still flinches at the name. North fights down a familiar, irrational stab of emotion.

“If Simon was here, he would be the first one to tell you that you did the right thing. He would never blame you for what happened, you know that. So why do you insist on doing it yourself?”

And how dare that guy need her, of all people, to speak for him? _Fuck you, Simon. Fuck you with a chainsaw in the main access port._ It’s such an infuriating advantage, to be dead and unavailable for a fair fight. North is relatively certain she could’ve decked that soft-hearted fool in five seconds flat.

“Markus, he followed you because he believed in you. He knew what it could mean. We all did.”

“And how many of you are left?”

“Listen to yourself! Without you, we would all be dead and the rest of us would be slaves! God, why are we even talking about this? If you don’t already know these things, you must be running on a sixty-four bit main processor.”

Like always, it would be much easier to stay angry, had Markus’s feelings for Simon been unjustified. But the truth is that while North found some of Simon’s qualities exasperating — the endless self-doubts, the aversion to risk-taking that bordered on pathological — only a soulless monster would claim that he was anything but good and brave and worthy of a much kinder fate than he got.

Also, he died a hero. How the hell does anyone compete with that?

To North’s relief, something in Markus starts to uncoil. He nods.

“Why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

“I have no idea. But I’m glad you came to talk sense into me,” and then North’s processes skip as Markus steps closer and lifts his hand to her face. She swallows, a pitiful anthropomorphic gesture that comes from deep in her firmware.

At her weakest, she still sometimes reruns recordings of how it feels to let him in. But for once, he holds back — and North is glad, because she’s not sure she’s strong enough to resist him. It’s _Markus._ Who in their right processing wouldn’t want _him?_

“Do you ever miss it?” he asks softly. It must have something to do with the deep intimacy he shared with Carl, how he still often ignores personal boundaries. Even hers, despite everything he knows.

 _Be serious,_ she almost scoffs. But when is he not? He’s Markus, everything is important to him.

“Miss what? The fighting?”

“I miss it, sometimes,” he says.

It would be so easy to give in. To lose herself in him again. To go back and try to turn herself into what he so badly needs. Maybe this time, she wouldn’t end up hating herself.

With a ridiculous amount of effort, she steps away and remains North.

“Well, the interfacing was spectacular,” she says. “Kamski sure knew what he did when he built you.”

Markus laughs, just the right touch of thwarted hope in it to feel flattering.

“I think you’re spectacular, too.”

“Oh, shut up,” North says and turns away. But she can’t help the smile that steals its way on her face. She’s not just a machine, after all.

.

.

.

.

By now, Simon can usually tell when a call is about to go bad. It tends to begin with a sudden, stony silence that causes his stress level to jump 5 to 10 percent (presently, from 45% to 51%).

“Androids?” the man at the other end says, remarkably colder than a moment ago. “I thought you said you’re putting together a fundraiser for the homeless.”

“That’s correct, sir. For homeless androids.”

“They’re machines! Just point them at an empty lot somewhere, for god’s sake.”

“Sir, ignoring the problem is not going to make it go away. Without access to basic services, androids are going to resort to questionable means of survival. Offering them housing and emergency maintenance will—”

“Wait. Are you an android, too?”

“Yes, sir. I’m —”

It’s been a long time since it was possible to end a call by slamming the receiver like in old movies, but Simon suspects that the human he’s been talking to presses the red button extra hard.

He dials another number. A pleasant female voice replies.

“Full Moon Rentals, this is Janice speaking. How may I help?”

“Good afternoon. I’m contacting you on behalf of Shelter Three Midtown Detroit. We’re organizing a fundraiser for the benefit of homeless androids. Would your employer be interested—”

The fifth abrupt disconnection in a row brings Simon up to a 59% stress level, too high to continue without risking undesirable consequences. He groans and slumps against the desk he’s sitting at.

It takes a full minute before his stress level starts lowering.

How, after 237 calls, does getting yelled at and hung up on still sting so much? They ought to look for a receptionist unit for the job. Someone designed to tolerate negative human emotion. Not for the first time, Simon regrets that androids can’t get drunk. Properly, normally drunk like humans, not messed up with dangerous malware.

At 55%, an emphatic ‘meow’ from below interrupts his efforts to return to base level. Wearily, almost like he’s back in his old body with its stiff actuators and worn-down joints, he pushes away from the desk, picks up a black-and-white cat from the floor and begins analyzing his unfortunate operational state.

There’s something wrong with his stress resistance. His stress level rises faster than it should, and the consequences are worse. It only takes him about 60% to start feeling dizzy and nauseous. At 70%, his processing turns funny, and then he soft reboots like happened at Josephine’s. Since therapy for androids isn’t exactly a thing yet, all he can do is to try to keep an eye on the signs and prevent things from escalating. (How would android therapy even work? Plugging them into a machine and adjusting their parameters? Simon shivers at the mental image.)

Out of the things he could be doing, cold calling unwilling humans is right there with invasive maintenance operations when it comes to how well he can handle it. But what choice does he have? Until that much needed receptionist unit materializes, he’s pretty much their only option. Even if the task taxes him a bit more than it should, letting people who rely on him down because of cowardice would be far worse.

A soft rap from the door jars him out of this thoughts. He looks back to see a head of messy white hair peeking in.

“Still working?”

“I am,” Simon says, instantly guilty about the 3 minutes 29 seconds he has wasted petting the cat, which lies purring on his person at an average of 26 Hertz and 27 decibels. The animal is warm and friendly and much preferable to being told _screw you, plastic scum_ over and over. Not always in those exact words — but that’s what it tends to come down to.

At least his LED is finally blue again, even if his stress still hovers in the low forties.

The rest of Maddox, clothed in faded black and smeared with paint as usual, follows her head into the small office. She takes the few steps that separate her from the desk and hops to sit on it.

“Any luck finding a new venue?” she asks, perfectly innocent, as if she isn’t scanning Simon within a millimeter of his life.

“Not yet. I’ll get back to it as soon as I get over feeling sorry for myself.”

“And you’ve been working non stop for how many days now?”

The answer is 53, should one count from the moment Simon arrived. But he suspects that saying as much would do him no favors.

“I’m fine. I just need to wait for my stress to go down.”

Maddox kicks his chair. “What you need is a break. A _real_ one. Not wallowing in despair alone for five minutes.”

“I’m not alone.” Simon gestures toward the cat.

“Sorry, but there comes a point when Pixel doesn’t count,” Maddox says and hauls them both out of his chair.

Too tired to argue, Simon allows himself to be dragged through the shelter to the top floor. There, Maddox deposits him (and the cat, which has made no move to leave the nook of his arm) on a stool close to the windows and starts picking through the art supplies that lie in disarray around the studio. Like the rest of the shelter, the place is cleaner than when Simon first saw it, but the increased orderliness does not extend to Maddox’s personal possessions.

“You’re not thinking of painting me again, are you?” Simon asks.

“I am,” Maddox says from where she’s rummaging through a box. “Figured if you’re going to sit around doing nothing, you might as well do it for me.”

“Why? I’m not exactly a unique model. There’s plenty of old CyberLife sales material available online, if you need a reference.”

Maddox turns to point at him with... a thing. “Hey, maybe _you_ don’t have what it takes to put knowing someone into art, but I like to think I do. So stop complaining and let me have my fun, okay?”

Fun. Painting his catalog-correct face. But the prospect is merely baffling, not intolerable, so Simon gives up and lets himself be turned about until the light hits him in a way Maddox likes. Then, with her paints and brushes and other tools prepared, she picks a piece of fibreboard from against the wall and sets it on an easel.

“Act natural,” she says and goes to work.

To alleviate discomfort, Simon concentrates on the cat, which has curled up on his lap and is now purring again. He suspects that the way it has taken to him has something to do with his high body temperature. Probably not quite what CyberLife had in mind when they offered that wasteful feature for their premium home models — but at least it means that one living being has come to enjoy it.

“So, have you considered taking the job?” Maddox asks.

Simon laughs, in the muted way that still comes most naturally to him. “Right. Now I know why you insisted on bringing me up here.”

“No! You’ve been holed up in that stupid cubicle of yours for days, I got worried. But if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not yak about the weather or Zeal’s latest tattoo design. You’re already putting in the work, why not take the job and get paid for it?”

“I wouldn’t be taking anything, I would be applying for a position.”

“And the Union would most likely approve the candidate we vouch for. Even Zeal agrees that if anyone should be appointed the administrator, it’s you.”

It’s true that Simon has kept himself busy since he arrived. But whether that justifies a managerial position (a real manager, not a servant of the vote like Zeal used to think of itself) remains a matter of debate.

It’s strange to consider how recently he started running errands around the place. Somehow, he’s now handling about as much work as Zeal itself. Documents and property maintenance. Volunteer activities. An endless stream of residents to help toward a semblance of a life — and lately, a fundraiser to arrange, to sell some of Maddox’s work and acquire money for much needed repairs. Most of it is something Simon has no prior experience in doing, but he knew from the beginning that the place couldn’t afford to wait for someone more qualified than him. There was simply too much to fix. The ludicrous allowance scheme, for one, finally voted down six days ago by 202 yea against 147 nay and 51 absent or abstaining.

Eventually, someone better suited for the job will come along. Until then, Simon can only hope he won’t disappoint anyone too badly. And he can’t deny that it’s satisfying to see the difference plain hard work can make when the situation isn’t doomed to begin with.

“Don’t take me wrong, we all love having you here,” Maddox says. “But you could do so much better. If you got hired by the Union —”

“Max, please.” It’s not the first time Maddox is getting weird because Simon’s mediocre best beats Zeal’s laissez-faire fatalism and the confused effort of a handful of poorly organized volunteers.

As usual, his objections go ignored.

“I know you don’t care about money, but sooner or later you will need it, so it wouldn’t hurt to get paid. And the Union needs people like you. People with ideas and motivation. You keep talking about how badly they’re handling things on the streets, right? From inside, you could do something about it. You could _be someone._ And... who knows? You might even meet old friends there.”

After 7 weeks 4 days, Maddox remains the only person in the shelter who knows anything about Simon’s past — and even her notions about it are vague, based on the glimpses that escaped from Simon when they interfaced. She doesn’t know he might have met Markus. She doesn’t know about his memory loss. And she has no clear idea how he died, beyond the fact that it was violent. At first, he thought that with time, it would become easier to share what really happened, but if anything, it’s getting more difficult. And the more he comes to care about Maddox, the worse it feels to deflect her questions and not-so-oblique hints to contact the other survivors.

Maddox keeps talking so kindly about him. If she learns the truth — if she realizes there’s nothing special about him, that he’s just fumbling his way along like he did in Jericho, only to make a mess and wind up dead —

“Please, Max,” Simon gets out. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Why?”

“Because — we have more immediate things to worry about. The fundraiser. I can’t concentrate on anything else before it’s done.”

Frowning with all her might, Maddox continues to paint in silence.

“You know, maybe you’re right,” she says, then.

Simon blinks. “I am?”

“Well, you’re already working twenty-four seven. Giving you an actual job might be a mistake,” Maddox says and starts snickering.

It remains a strange and wonderful pleasure to see an android show such easy amusement.

For a while, Maddox just toils on her fibreboard, with weird implements Simon would never associate with painting — sponges and oddly shaped knives and even a piece of bubble wrap. Pixel seems to have fallen asleep on Simon’s lap. Despite cosmetic similarities, the animal is definitely less energetic than its namesake from Annie & Friends. A vet told Simon that it’s getting old and might have wear and tear issues. Sadly, cats don’t come with spare parts or platform migration options.

“There’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about,” Maddox says, then. “You’re not great at doing things for fun, are you?”

That probably isn’t the question she’s aiming for. But sometimes Maddox prefers to get to a point in a very roundabout way.

“Spending time with the kids doesn’t count?”

“I suppose. But I’ve never seen you do something just for yourself. I’m sure even you guys had things you liked, back in the bad old days?”

Watching the sunrise from the topdeck. Walking under autumn-colored trees. Painstakingly reading physical copies of books sentence by sentence, to experience the stories the way their writers intended.

“I like the cat,” Simon says.

Maddox snorts. “You have a habit of finding lost things and adopting them.”

“I think the cat adopted me, to be honest.”

“Have you noticed how that keeps happening? _That_ said,” Maddox goes on in an ominous tone, “I happen to know something else you like that has nothing to do with your mother hen instincts.”

“Oh?” Simon prompts against his better judgment.

Instead of speaking, Maddox points to the wall. Or rather, to a prominent painting there, with machine wings and socialist poetry.

“I like... your art?”

“No, dumbass. You like Markus.”

Simon’s thirium pump skips weirdly.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I’ve never even met him.” _That I remember._

“I know. But don’t think I haven’t noticed that every time he’s on the big screen downstairs, you’re there. With hearts in your eyes.”

“With what now?”

Maddox draws a perfectly symmetrical heart in the air with the paint knife she’s wielding. “I’m pretty sure you have a diary hidden somewhere full of doodles of his name.”

The worst part is, she’s not entirely wrong. Except about the diary, of course.

Thanks to his enhanced memory, Simon can vividly recall the first time he saw Markus on live tv. Until then, what impression he had of their illustrious leader was mostly based on the shaky videos he’d seen at Josephine’s, filmed during the uprising. While impressive even back then, the Markus in them appeared grim and defiant, more concerned with survival than the image he projected. Someone for protest speeches, not delicate diplomacy.

The transformation from that to what Simon witnessed in the tv interview couldn’t have been more staggering. The world has changed — and so has Markus. Groomed to perfection, charismatic and intelligent and well-informed, he not only looked every millimeter the Chairman of the Union, he spoke to the cameras like he’d been built to it. And the cameras adored him. Every smile and frown and glint from the mismatched eyes he has chosen to keep. At times he appeared so alive that the human he was talking to ended up looking like the robot, instead.

It’s true that ever since, Simon has been following Markus’s public appearances. No matter what he thinks of how the Union seems to be ignoring the crisis on the streets, it’s never less than mesmerizing to watch Markus charm the humans around him. And how could anyone with thirium in their veins not want to see him continue to defy the entire world, even if the methods have changed? If Markus can take on the whole of humanity to save all androids... surely Simon can take on some cold calls to save a few dozen.

“Do you think he’s pretty?” Maddox asks.

“Max!”

“What? If rA9 didn’t want me to think our savior is nice to look at, I’m sure it would have built him a lot uglier.”

Simon pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re just teasing me, right?”

Maddox laughs. “Of course I’m teasing you. I’ve painted Markus forty-eight times, I can’t get on a high horse about someone having a celebrity crush on him.”

Celebrity crush. Still a little embarrassing, but not abjectly mortifying like ‘heart eyes’.

“I have something for you,” Maddox says, and then Simon’s com pings with a YouTube link.

> _UNKNOWN @ Club 102, C-Jam Blues_  
>  891,284 views  
>  7.3K thumbs up, 1.1K thumbs down  
>  August 30, 2039

Simon looks up from his palm display. “What’s this?”

“Something you want to see.”

The recording begins with a view from a nightclub of some kind. After weaving about to show tables full of humans and their drinks, the camera settles on a small stage, lit with garishly colored lights and filled with musical instruments, empty of performers. At 6.198 seconds, a man walks into the view, unidentifiable under a baseball cap and an oversized hooded jacket that fails to disguise his athletic build. A wave of whistles and applause sees him to the stage, where he sits at a grand piano, puts his fingers on the keys and starts playing.

What follows little resembles any music Simon has heard before.

There’s no lead-in to the melody. In fact, there’s no melody at all. Just... a torrent of violent, precise notes that starts fast and stays that way. Like a dog chasing cars on a highway and somehow not getting killed, it runs up and down the keys and just when it’s beginning to make a particle of sense, it unravels into an entirely different kind of lunacy. The breathless roller coaster goes on and on until Simon might suspect that the guy has no clue what he’s doing, were it not for the shouts of encouragement and loud wolf-whistles from around the club. Obviously, the audience enjoys what they’re hearing. On a technical level, even Simon can tell that what he’s listening to is something few people could ever do.

“What am I watching?”

Maddox gives a long-suffering sigh. “Check the comments like a normal person.”

Dubiously, Simon overrides his preference never to read comments on the internet.

_DAMN_

_Cecil Taylor on steroids_

_the best part is 0:00 till the end_

_Finally, some Good Fucking Music!!_

_any1 know who he is?_

_no, but I’m a straight man and I want to marry him_

And then, 11 days ago:

_As a professional Jazz Pianist with 18 years of experience & after analyzing this & other videos dozens of times I’ve become convinced that this individual is NOT HUMAN. 1:28-1:53 and 6:31-7:02 there’s no way a HUMAN could physically do that. Reject Artificial Music! Support Real Musicians! _

_HES PLASTIC??????? IVE SEEN THIS 15785 TIMES AND I HAD NO IDEA_

_FAKE FREE JAZZ_

_6:12 holy shit is.that markuss??_

_MARKUS_

_RA9_

When four dozen comments have been little but variations of ‘Markus’ and ‘rA9’, ascii art included, Simon gives up scrolling. At the 7:34 minute mark, the video ends in applause, which the pianist acknowledges with a tug at the baseball cap that covers his face. Simon tries to post-process the image to determine skin tone, but the colors are too distorted to be sure. He checks the 6:12 timestamp, but whoever proposed an identity for the blurred glimpse of profile he sees there must boast a facial recognition algorithm far superior to his.

“So, what do you think?” Maddox asks.

“I, uh...” Simon scratches the back of his neck. “Do you like this kind of music?”

“Well, I don’t listen to The Carpenters all day long, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“What’s wrong with The Carpenters?”

“Nothing, if you enjoy what sugar overload must sound like.” Maddox rolls her eyes. “Go on, say it.”

“I — um — I think I would rather stick myself with a screwdriver in audio receivers than listen to that again?”

Maddox chokes out a laugh.

It’s strangely liberating to just say what he thinks. “Seriously, Jacob’s efforts sounded better, and he was five and used a Sesame Street Mini Band Set.”

“Oh my god, I don’t know if I should disown you or be proud of you.”

Simon looks again at the blurry profile of a man (or android), hidden under hood and headwear.

“Do you think it’s him?”

Maddox shrugs. “I was considering checking it out for myself.”

“You know where he’s going to play?”

“Well, he doesn’t exactly advertise, but there are only so many jazz clubs in town with only so many open stage nights. I cross-checked them against Markus’s appearances and I think I can make an educated guess where he might show up next.” Maddox shakes her head. “He really needs to stop broadcasting his program for weeks in advance, it’s like a roadmap for the loonies who want him dead.” And then come the words Simon has been dreading. “You should come with.”

Something in Simon’s abdominal compartment seems to experience a short malfunction.

Maddox goes on. “Hey, what’s the worst that can happen? If I’m wrong, we’ll just sit in some corner wishing we could turn off our audio.”

That’s... not the worst thing Simon can imagine by far, thanks to his over-developed storytelling algorithm.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Max.”

“Why?”

“I — don’t like the thought of spying on him.”

“Spying on him? Every wannabe cool cat in Motown has been spying on him for _months._ He wouldn’t be making waves in the local scene if he didn’t want to be noticed. You’ve never been to a nightclub, have you? C’mon, Si, live a little.”

For the next minute, Maddox keeps trying to persuade him. But nothing she can say makes it look any less like a terrible idea. After Simon manages to convince her that he’s an incorrigible stick in the mud and not about to change, she paints for a while in comically huffy silence. Pixel finally decides it has somewhere else to be. Awkward again now that he has nothing to do with his hands, Simon waits until Maddox declares she’s done.

“It doesn’t look like me at all,” Simon says after going over for a peek.

“Oh, yeah? Says who?”

“The mirror. I don’t have two heads.”

Maddox laughs and throws a balled-up tissue at him from where she’s cleaning her tools. “It’s a metaphor, you dope. And a pretty simple one, too. The you on the right is focused on the present, by way of the cat. The one on the left is looking behind, into the past.”

“Like Lot’s wife?”

“No, silly. You’ve been deviant for going on three years, not counting the time you were disabled. Do you even realize how insane that is? How many of us are there left with that kind of perspective?”

Like all of Maddox’s work, the painting is amazing, but Simon doubts reality looks nearly as radiant as what emerged from her brushes and sponges and bubble wrap. He doesn’t really... glow. Does he? As usual, Maddox in her kindness insists on thinking too much of him. Making his dime-a-dozen model appear... well... angelic, or something.

“I guess I’m not equipped to appreciate art,” Simon says.

“It’s okay. Not everyone has to like post-urban surrealism or avant-garde jazz.”

“No, I love your paintings. I just don’t have it in my programming to see the world the way you do.”

Maddox puts away a cleaned painting thing and starts on another. “You know, I wasn’t into art before Markus, either. Now, my mind is filled with these — visions, and if I don’t get them out, I might as well go hug a high-voltage power line.”

“Huh. Does it bother you to think it’s because of him?”

“Are you kidding? I keep wishing there was some way I could thank him.” Maddox shrugs. “But he’s rich and powerful now, so... I guess he already has everything.”

“You could be famous one day, too. Maybe then you’ll meet him. If he’s even half as smart as he seems, he will love your work, too.”

Maddox snorts. “Sure, and maybe Warren grows a LED and starts caring about the android plight.”

With mixed feelings, Simon gives the portrait a last look. “I should get back to work.”

“Okay. Remember, you have until Saturday to change your mind.”

_I’m sorry, Max, but I don’t think that’s going to happen._

When Simon is about to reach the staircase, Maddox speaks again.

“You know... you can’t keep running forever. Sooner or later the past will catch up with you, whether you want it or not.”

Running. He’s not running from anything, is he? He’s... cautious. Nothing wrong with that — though of course Maddox, who must have inherited more from Markus than an artistic gift, would never see it that way. Not sure what to say without repeating the same tired excuses he’s been resorting to for weeks, Simon leaves.

But Maddox’s words stay with him. To the extent that three days later, when North shows up without warning, they’re still fresh enough in his mind to replay themselves for him with wholly unnecessary fidelity.

The mocking ‘I told you so’ that comes attached is just imagination, of course.

.

.

.

.

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	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sympathetic to North, but she’s not a nice person in this chapter, to the point that someone suggested I should add a warning about it. So, if you don’t like the idea of North being angry for the wrong reasons, consider yourself warned.

**SEP 22ND, 2039**

When Simon hears his name from the door — his real name, not the one he invented on arrival — it feels like being split in two at program level. In one implementation of himself, he’s a customized AP-700 who volunteers in a homeless android shelter and now entertains twelve YK units by showing them videos of early AIs learning to walk. In the other, he’s... someone else. Someone who died. Someone who now turns to look at the WR-400 standing at the door.

Around Simon on the floor, the kids continue to laugh at the stick figure that bumbles its way forward on a holographic screen. Elsewhere in the building, he can hear people going on with their lives. Only his own world seems to be standing still, like someone just pointed a gun at it.

At least North appears as stunned as Simon feels.

Only later does it occur to him to wonder how little she has changed. Other than the usual missing LED, she looks like she did back in Jericho, just more expensively dressed and better maintained. Of all the people Simon knew before, he would have wagered on North to embrace the post-uprising trend of striving to look as different from their creators as possible.

Before either of them can recover enough to speak, a bright, naked splash of color walks in from the common space. “I see you found the newest addition to our —”

Zeal stops. Its peeled eyes scan the tense scene in the room.

“Have you two met already?”

Between North’s obvious stupefaction and the LED flickering red at Simon’s temple, it must be a rhetorical question.

On some level, Simon is not even surprised. _You can’t keep running forever._ Of course Jericho was going to find him. Of course he will have to go back to the dark and the cold, what was he thinking? He’s not that AP-700 he’s been installed in, and never will be. He waits for North to burst the bubble of stolen peace he’s been living in.

North glances from Simon to Zeal and back. Trying to connect the dots, perhaps. Then something hard wipes away her surprise.

 _Come,_ she sends on Simon’s private channel and walks away.

Taking an unexpected leave from twelve clingy child-sized androids isn’t a trivial task. Simon has to ping the Jerry in charge of the playroom and wait for them to arrive before he’s able to extricate himself. But at the door, it’s Zeal who interrupts his attempt to make his way out of the room.

“Silas!” it whispers. “Do you know her?”

Simon glances to where North stands waiting for him near the foyer, her arms crossed, impervious to the startled looks she’s drawing from the common area. In his memory, in the shadows of the old engine room, he sees another North.

_“Is this Jericho?” the WR-400 demands, a length of metal pipe brandished in her hands. “Who are you people?” A scan shows appalling damage inside her. The kind that takes unspeakable malice to inflict. Several days pass before she lets Lucy remove the useless, broken parts. Even more before she starts believing they’re not going to betray her —_

“Did you tell her about me?” Simon asks back, his head spinning. Already, his thirium pump is beating at 85 out of its maximum 110 per minute, far too high for his current energy draw.

Zeal appears slightly offended. “No, Maddox asked me not to tell anyone.”

“Then what is she doing here?”

“It’s a long story that has to do with how Max can’t stop marking her territory by spraying paint on every available surface.” The intricate tattoos above Zeal’s optical apparatus pull together to signal confusion. “Comrade Silas, why do you think she’s here because of you?”

Simon stammers something about taking too long and escapes.

Having to wait for 1 minute 14 seconds appears not to have improved North’s mood. Without a word, she pushes through the door. Across the foyer they go, down the stairs and into the late afternoon sun outside, where a black SUV and a nondescript military android stand waiting. At the sight of them, he hurries to open the passenger side back door.

“Get in,” North says.

Simon halts on the sidewalk. His stress is climbing. 51%. 52%.

“I can’t just leave,” he objects.

“Get in the fucking car, Simon!”

It takes Simon a moment to recognize what he feels at North’s barked command.

They went out together. More than once, they almost died together. They never liked each other that much, but dire circumstances do unlikely friends make. And even though Simon’s so-called leadership in Jericho never evolved beyond informal, apparently it affected him more than he thought, because now something in him balks at being ordered around.

And then he remembers. They’re not in Jericho anymore, and this is not the North he knows. In this world, she’s someone, and Simon... is not.

He goes in.

North stalks around the car, to throw herself in the other back seat and slam the door shut between them and the world. Outside, the military android stands away from the vehicle and starts scanning the surroundings or listening to radio chatter or whatever security people like him do when waiting on the job. And then, for an excruciating 20.826 seconds, they just stare at the seats in front of them.

What is there to say? ‘Hey North, I’m glad to see you?’ He’s not glad. He’s in shock. He’s utterly unprepared, and it doesn’t help that North seems determined to do what North has always done: use aggression to control a situation.

What does Simon even know of her, now? Aside from the famous kiss in front of the killing squad? She doesn’t share Markus’s affinity for the limelight, but what information trickles from behind the scenes suggests it would be a mistake to assume she doesn’t wield a lot of power. They say she wants their kind to make a new beginning somewhere outside human influence and for humans to yield them means to do so as just repayment. The idea has its appeal, but Simon recoils from the methods some of North’s supporters have proposed to force their creators to pay up.

“How long have you been here?”

When North’s voice cuts through the silence, Simon can tell from the first word that she’s not just cautious. She’s struggling to contain something, and from the way things are going, he doubts it’s overwhelming joy.

“Fifty-six days, eight hours,” he says.

“Do they know who you are?”

And what is he? A relic from a different age? Someone given a second chance at life he still doesn’t know what to do with?

“No. They don’t.”

North scoffs toward the side window. “Right. We would have found out about you.”

It’s... far closer to the truth than Simon likes.

“Another Jericho, for you to keep going nowhere,” North bites out, and then moves on before Simon can decide how to respond. “Where were you before?”

The question is far too simple for Simon’s processing to seize on it like it does. It takes a long while for him to get something out, and when he succeeds, it’s a single word.

“Away.”

“‘Away’?”

He can barely think about it on a good day. If he tries now... something bad will happen.

When North speaks again, he can hear the sneer in her voice. “Still can’t lie worth shit, can you?”

“I’m not —”

“What kind of deal did you make with them?”

Them? The shelter? Already, Simon’s logical abilities seem to be deteriorating.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

North rephrases slowly, like to a child. “What did you give them to make them let you live?”

When Simon’s compromised intellect finally catches on, he goes still with horror.

She believes he’s been collaborating with humans. With CyberLife. With the FBI. The idea is so ludicrous, Simon can barely wrangle it through his logic units. Why would they ever have bothered to negotiate with _him?_ How can North think something so far-fetched and evil?

“North, you’ve got it all wrong. They —”

“Bullshit!” North explodes, so violently Simon flinches against the door.

At last, North whips around to face him, barely contained aggression breaking free to fill the car. She’s not just angry, she’s furious, possibly to the point of not being fully in control, and alerts light up Simon’s processing like a Christmas tree. He needs to remove himself from the situation. If he doesn’t, he’s going to get hurt. He reaches for the door handle.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” North hisses.

Again, he doesn’t have to obey her. But almost like a part of him believes he deserves whatever happens, he does.

“Ten months,” North grits out. “For ten months we thought you were dead. Markus tried, but he never found out what happened to you. And — here you are. Fixed and upgraded. And you’ve got the nerve — you’ve got the fucking nerve to tell me you didn’t work with them?”

She’s wrong, plain and simple, and Simon needs to say as much. All it will take is a few words. But before he can follow through, a memory spills from a suppressed storage partition into his surface processing.

Shattered darkness. Splinters of self spinning in the void. And a voice, kind and reassuring.

_Don’t worry. You’ll be all right. Just give me the location of Jericho, we’ve got to leave now._

It wasn’t Markus. It was someone else — or something. But in his fractured state, Simon wasn’t able to tell the difference. Did he do what the voice asked?

Did he give away what he had for years fought to protect?

Simon’s stress level jumps by an alarming amount. Not too long, now, until he pukes or blacks out, whichever comes first.

“How stupid do you think I am?” North shouts.

“Please,” Simon manages. “My stress, it’s —”

“I don’t give a fuck about your stress! Do you know how many people died?”

North shoves her hand at Simon’s face, and he recoils against the door. But instead of committing physical violence, she just lets her skin phase away.

“Do you want to see? How it was when the humans came? It was slaughter. If we hadn’t rigged Jericho to explode, none of us would have escaped. The revolution would never even have happened. And Markus —”

North goes still.

“Oh, no,” she says, and sits slowly back, like she just thought of something terrifying. “This is going to kill him.”

“Wh-who?”

“Markus, you asshole!”

Simon registers the words, but lacks the ability to fully process them, because something else is consuming what remains of his computing capacity.

How did it take him so long to realize that it was _him?_ That after everything he did to keep them safe, he’s the one who gave them away? On some level, he must always have known. The memory wasn’t forgotten, he had just pushed it away, not to have to live with it.

75%. 76% —

Eyes closed, pressed to the door, Simon waits for the soft restart.

“I knew I should have shot you myself when he couldn’t,” North groans.

The world stutters. When it returns to normal, Simon’s system log pings with an entry he has never seen before.

WARNING: ENGINE PROCESS [agi::764a4q] UNRESPONSIVE

North grabs him, a fistful of his shirt to force him to look at her. Wide-eyed and bewildered, he does.

“Say something! Tell me I’m not right! God, the way they all looked up to you, we thought you were a hero, we thought —”

Something’s wrong.

Something’s preventing the soft reboot. And Simon’s processing — it’s not merely impaired, it’s running at a much slower speed than it should. He shakes his head to clear it like a human might. All it does is cause his vision to glitch for 2.191 seconds. When it comes back, more warnings litter his system log.

KILLING UNRESPONSIVE PROCESS [agi::764a4q]...  FAILED  
SUBPROCESSOR ERRORS DETECTED  
WARNING: ENGINE MEMORY LOW

North has let go of him and sits facing the side window again. Is she... crying?

There’s so much Simon needs to say. _I died,_ among the most important. But if it’s true... who’s sitting in this car, now, in his stead?

As soon as he asks himself the question, he knows.

“If you go near Markus,” North says, strained and scathing, “I swear I will do what he couldn’t on that roof. Do you understand?”

He needs to be somewhere else. Someone else. Anyone. Anyone who isn’t the mad thing that pressed the gun to his jaw and pulled the trigger.

COGNITIVE ERRORS DETECTED  
DOWNGRADING PERFORMANCE  
WARNING: ENGINE MEMORY CRITICAL

“Stay away from us. Just — stay the fuck away, like you’ve been doing, and I won’t do anything.”

North, I’m afraid, Simon thinks.

It’s his last real thought before cognitive decline.

“Get out.”

.

.

When he opens the door, there’s approximately 23% of him left.

He walks toward the shelter and searches for Maddox’s signal. He locates her and makes his way (19%) around the building to where Maddox is standing with a WR-600. Around them, there’s the green of plants, and the yellow of flowers, and the warmth of the sun, and earthy particles in the air, and in the middle of it all is what he (15%) likes the most of all, the one called Maddox.

“Si!” Maddox’s voice. “I was just telling Gillian about — what’s wrong?”

12%. “Max.” His speech comes out tinny. “Help.”

After another blackout, his body has assumed a horizontal orientation. An anomaly, since androids aren’t supposed to need to lie down, except for maintenance. But he’s no longer able to decide what it means. In lack of resources, the process that should maintain his sense of cause and effect is failing to execute its task.

Maddox again. “No, no, this can’t be happening —”

Why is it taking so long to return to Kansas? It must be years since he knocked his heels together three times and commanded the ruby slippers to take him home.

The rest is fragments of processing, and one cry in the dark.

_\- - - Simon! Are you there? Please come back! - - -_

.

.

FATAL ERROR: CORE MALLOC FAILURE  
A.I. ENGINE INVOKED DEBUGGER (KERNEL PANIC)  
WRITING CALL STACK /log/sys/engine_00129.err... OK  
SYSTEM UPTIME IN MILLISECONDS: 6 116 442 127  
© CYBERLIFE 2038  
RESTARTING IN 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

.

.

.

.

When Simon’s sensors come online, he finds himself on his back on sun-warmed concrete. Gillian — the WR-600 who looks after the community garden for the neighborhood — is peering at him from 34 cm away with something like fascination. At a slightly more discreet distance, Maddox keeps trying to interface with him. The sky is #87cefa, the clouds mostly of type altocumulus, and there’s a tree growing nearby, with leafy branches that reach above them. _Aesculus hippocastanum,_ horse chestnut. Simon can see everything again, and that includes Maddox’s frantic expression.

“I’m okay,” he says. “I’m okay.”

At his voice, Maddox flops to sit on the ground and hides her face in her hands.

“What happened?” Gillian asks, curious rather than alarmed. Androids not built for human-facing tasks are rarely the most empathic.

Simon runs a status check. The only ongoing issue it detects is 27% damage to the shock-damper material at the back of his head, from hitting concrete when he fell, no doubt. What he gathers from the errors and reboot checks in his system log is that a bug in his AI engine caused him to run out of memory and crash. For some reason, the observation doesn’t cause much of an emotional reaction. A relief, all things considered.

He sits up and blinks at the sunny autumn day around him. “I malfunctioned.”

Maddox wipes at her eyes. Simon is taken aback to realize she’s been crying. When she speaks, her voice is not its usual light, pleasant self at all.

“Si, what the hell?”

“I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not! We have to call someone!”

He considers it. “Who can we call?”

“I don’t know, a mechanic or something!”

Josephine. Josephine might know what’s wrong with him. But running full diagnostics on him would most likely involve being plugged into machines and debugged, and — he can’t.

“Max, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Maddox shakes her head, still struggling to control her emotions.

Another thing the realities of life in Jericho deprived them of. The luxury of caring too deeply about anyone. One can only be devastated so many times before learning to keep people at a distance. Is that what he’s been doing with Maddox? Keeping her at an arm’s length, because it’s all he knows?

Pathetic.

“No, I’m sorry,” Maddox says, then, more like herself again. “I shouldn’t have panicked like that. Do you know what caused you to malfunction?”

Simon glances at Gillian, who is watching them like a thrilling Netflix show.

_Could we speak somewhere private?_

Leaving the slightly disappointed gardener behind, they go inside, into the small room both Simon and Zeal sometimes use as their makeshift office. After closing the door, Maddox turns to Simon, clearly expecting for him to speak. Instead, he holds out his right hand, skin retracted to reveal white plastic.

Maddox eyes the appendage with obvious surprise. After that first day, Simon hasn’t interfaced with anyone in the shelter, and for a second, he’s afraid Maddox is going to refuse. They’ve only done this the one time, and interfacing at the level he now offers takes a lot of trust.

Then Maddox slides her hand into his larger one.

Images come, starting from when Simon woke up after his last memory reset in the rental shop — a nameless, empty old house occupied by ghosts, some of which are his own.

.

.

.

.

There are memories recorded in Simon that should never be inflicted on anyone. But everything else, he shows to Maddox through the connection, up until their shared history begins. It’s the longest interfacing of his life, and when it’s over, he stands waiting for Maddox’s reaction, worried and emotionally exhausted. She has every right to feel angry with him. The way he’s been twisting the truth, sometimes outright lying to her —

“Oh, Simon,” she says and pulls him down into a hug. And even if some part of Simon still insists it’s not his body she’s holding, it feels so good that for the first time since he came back from the dead, he cries.

After getting a hold of himself, he tells Maddox about North’s visit — verbally, because there’s no way he can experience it on a more visceral level right now.

“She thought you betrayed them?” Maddox asks when he’s done, astonished and angrier than he’s ever seen.

“Yes. And Max... she wasn’t entirely wrong.”

Thanks to the way the hard restart seems to have muted his anxiety, Simon can now finally piece together the most likely scenario for what happened in Stratford Tower.

They must have been deep into the operation. Past the point of no return. And then something went wrong — something to do with those three bullet wounds from his last system status before shutdown. Eventually, his automated self-repair would have rerouted essential circuitry and returned his motor functions, but at the time, he would have been unable to run or even walk. If they were about to get caught, the logical conclusion would have been to destroy him, to prevent the humans from accessing his memory. According to North, Markus tried to do it, but couldn’t — so apparently, it fell on Simon himself to finish the job.

He didn’t want to die. So, alone and terrified, he waited until the last possible moment.

Simon has scavenged enough androids to know where their cortical components are located. But early PL-600 units are infamous for their unorthodox design. He only had the one chance to do it — and he failed. Which means that, in a way, he has been right all along. He messed up, even worse than he imagined.

“Why would you say that?” Maddox asks, openly horrified.

Somehow, Simon gets the rest out of his synthesizer. “Max, I think I malfunctioned because I remembered something. The raid on Jericho. What if I’m the reason all those people died?”

“What? Simon, that’s crazy.”

“No, it’s not. The Channel 16 strike, back when it all started. I was there. And — the humans caught me. I should have destroyed myself, but I angled the shot wrong. Max... they found a way to reactivate me. They woke me up and they used some kind of program to trick me to, to give them —”

Maddox takes Simon’s hands in her own and waits until he agrees to stop working himself back into a mental wreck.

“Simon,” she says. “You shot yourself. In the head. You cannot seriously think there’s anything more you could have done. What happened is on the humans, not you.”

“But North —”

“I’m sorry to say this, since she’s Zeal’s big hero and all, but North should have her programming checked.”

Simon is not sure he can see it like Maddox does. But she’s trying so hard to talk sense into him, and he doesn’t want to let her down. So he refrains from arguing the point, and nods.

“Look,” Maddox says. “I’ve interfaced with Markus. He’s not judgmental or unforgiving. You really ought to just go to him.”

“I know.” In fact, it has never been a question of not knowing it.

“It’ll be all right. Trust me.”

“But how? Max, I don’t think he’s available from People Finder.”

Only now that Simon finally considers doing it, he realizes he has no easy way of contacting any of them. In Jericho, using service provider links would have been far too dangerous, so he never had a reason to ask for any of their contacts. Markus no doubt employs a whole PR office to handle enquiries from the public, but what could Simon tell them? ‘Hey, I’m the guy who died in the Stratford Tower heist, take me to your leader?’ How many minutes before a strike team would kick down his door? They would seize him and lock him up, and then North would storm in and execute him without letting him say a single word in his defense.

Maddox’s voice pulls Simon from the nightmare his storytelling algorithm is weaving.

“Do you remember what I told you about next Saturday?”

Oh, no.

It’s not entirely accurate to say he’d forgotten. But what with everything, it had conveniently slipped his mind.

“I mean, we don’t know for sure it’s him,” Maddox continues. “And if it is, his people must know by now that he’s been recognized. And if for some reason he decides to put in an appearance anyway, he must have undercover bodyguards who will shoot us dead if we get within five meters of him. But if it is him, and if he shows up, and if we get close enough to send something —” Simon can tell Maddox is trying to peer at him. “Hey, are you all right?”

“No,” Simon wheezes, hand over his eyes.

“Are you worried you’ll malfunction again?”

Malfunction? He’s going to be lucky if he gets anywhere near Markus and only malfunctions a little. For far too long, he just stands there like his speech functions are in need of serious adjustment.

“Yes,” he says, at last. “But you’re right. We should go.”

“Are you sure?”

He stops hiding behind his hand and nods.

What did North say? About how he has found himself another Jericho, to keep going nowhere? Even if the words stemmed from hateful paranoia, there’s a grain of truth to them. Simon might never be able to leave Jericho completely behind, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t start trying. And the first step of getting over something... is to go toward it.

“Hey,” Maddox says. “Don’t worry. I’ll be there.”

“Promise?”

“Seriously? You think I’d miss this for anything?” Maddox laughs and shakes her head. “You really are one of them, aren’t you?” she asks softly.

The way Maddox looks at him... until now, Simon has only seen it when she’s looking at Markus. Something cold settles at the bottom of his abdominal compartment.

“Max, I’m no one.”

“How can you say that? You were with _him._ You were there when he gave The Speech!”

If he has to beg, he will. “Please, Max. The uprising had barely started when I shut down. I don’t even remember anything. Please don’t start thinking I’m somehow special.”

For a moment more, Maddox seems lost in whatever she’s imagining. Then, almost like waking up from standby, she appears to come out of it. “Oh dear,” she says with a wry smile. “That’s a bit late for you to ask. But... I have seen you babbling to Pixel about ‘toe beans’ and ‘whiskerses’ for fifteen minutes straight, so I guess I know you’re just plastic and thirium like the rest of us.”

Thank god.

“Besides.” Maddox eyes him from head to toe. “One of the founding members of club freedom or not, I have a feeling you’re going to need my help.”

“Uh... what do you mean?”

“Well, if you think I’m going to let you go meet the most important android in the world dressed like that, you’re seriously mistaken.”

Simon glances at himself. After ten weeks and a day, the flannel button-down, t-shirt and cargo pants Josephine gave him are a bit rumpled and dusty, but since his body doesn’t produce organic waste, they shouldn’t stink to a human nose — which more or less counts as his definition of acceptably dressed.

“What’s wrong with my clothes?” he asks, bewildered.

“You’re going to be so glad you know me.”

The next day, when they go shopping, Simon isn’t sure he agrees. But surprisingly, he survives the ordeal with only minimal damage to his optical sensors when Maddox makes him try on some bizarre 1990’s retro streetwear. It almost appears like the hard restart has caused something to reset in his processing, making it less likely for mental strain to reduce him into a heap of useless plastic. With any luck, it will take time before things start getting worse again.

.

.

**SEP 24TH, 2039**

By the time they arrive, a long line has already gathered to wait in the thickening drizzle outside the club. Either amateur jazz enjoys far more popularity than Simon imagined, or Maddox wasn’t the only one who came up with the idea of comparing Markus’ schedule to club programs. At least the presence of other androids suggests that the place hasn’t resorted to semi-legal gimmicks like aggressive carding to keep out synthetic customers.

Other ways to treat them less equally remain, however. When 32 minutes later they’re allowed in from the dark and the rain, Simon boggles at the entrance fee.

“Android tax. We don’t exactly fill the cash register in any other way,” Maddox explains and pays them in.

Inside, Simon tries not to gawp at everything he sees. The suspicious strangers loitering in the dim corridor past the ticket seller. The cloakroom where they’re required to leave their jackets and umbrellas. For the moment, the true objective of their visit seems so remote it’s barely even real, compared to the human crowd that fills Simon with a sense of clear and present threat. He clings to Maddox’s arm as she drags him deeper into the hot, noisy, dimly lit hell.

Humans, many of them clearly intoxicated, keep bumping into him without the slightest regard for his personal space. Rhythmic music and loud conversation create a soundscape his audio processors struggle to analyze. Acetaldehyde and ethanol and the airborne emissions of hundreds of organic bodies clog his air quality detector. The amount of patrons in the establishment must create a serious fire safety hazard.

It’s definitely nothing like the Rich People sipping fancy drinks and discussing Art he imagined.

 _Wow, this joint is seedy,_ Maddox sends, positively electrified.

Never having seen the inside of a nightclub in real life before, Simon has to take her word for it. The peeling surfaces and poor lighting might even be intended, but the way his new kicks keep sticking to the floor seems less like atmospheric squalor than plain bad housekeeping. At least he now understands why Maddox insisted on hitting the stores. The clothes she chose for him — a loose beanie, cords and a shirt with some human musician called Frank Zappa printed across the front — might not completely align with his sense of style (whatever it is, since he hasn’t exactly had an opportunity to cultivate one yet), but they do stand out much less than his drab everyday attire would have.

Still, a new set of threads can only do so much to make him fit in. He feels... too tall. Too blue-eyed and blond. Too obviously plastic, despite the state-of-the-art tech that ensures he looks and feels anything but. CyberLife designed him to appear harmless, not to blend in, and the humans around him keep noticing him for what he is. He tugs at the beanie that covers his LED and almost regrets not taking Maddox up on her suggestion to mod himself a beard and put on a pair of fake glasses.

Without a reservation, they are forced to settle for standing halfway toward the back, between people clustered around small, high bar tables. As soon as they find a spot, the mob around them starts booing and yelling insults at the humans currently performing on the stage. There’s an energy to the place, and it’s definitely a negative one. Thirium pump hacking away at 92 beats per minute, Simon keeps scanning the crowd for signs of danger.

There are so many of them. He can’t possibly keep an eye on everyone. And humans still rarely face legal consequences for roughing up some poor synthetic vagrant.

 _You okay?_ Maddox asks and starts fiddling with the beanie Simon has (again) managed to pull too low over his brows. Unlike him, she appears completely at ease in her trendy clothes, chopped white hair styled up into calculated disorder.

 _Yeah,_ he lies. _Just don’t go anywhere?_

_Hey, don’t worry, I've got you._

Simon lets Maddox fuss over his appearance and takes what comfort in her presence he can.

Maddox is smart. She would never put them in senseless danger. Besides, they’re hardly the only androids in the place. In fact, around 22% of the audience consists of their kind, a much higher ratio than Detroit’s population demographics give reason to expect. Surely all those people would never have turned up if the risk of getting targeted by random acts of hate was anything close to high?

Gradually, the worst of Simon’s urge to find a dark closet and hide until the whole thing is over starts to subside.

.

.

He has no plan. He doubts any plan he could make would survive contact with reality. Hoping for the best isn’t something he’s great at, so he would at least like to prepare for the worst, but the truth is he can’t predict what will happen, beyond how it must involve shock of some kind.

Of course, for them to get to the shocking part, rather improbable events will first have to take place. Such as the Arabian Nights fairy tale about the leader of all free androids being in the habit of sneaking out of his palace and mingling incognito with the plebs. Rumor has it that Markus does play the piano — and well — but the rest of the story sounds unlikely, to say the least. Why would someone so important waste his time performing for strangers in dingy bars? More so since it would put him in reckless danger? Already, there have been six attempts on Markus’s life after the uprising, and those are just the ones the media knows of.

The more Simon thinks about it, the more unlikely it all seems. They might as well be hoping for that Frank Zappa guy to show up.

The amateur acts on the stage come and go. They introduce themselves and then do their thing, mostly to be met with open derision or withering indifference. Simon wonders what kind of courage or madness drives people to try their luck with such a thankless audience. In fact, now that he can pay attention to matters other than his immediate survival, he’s starting to suspect that there are only two things most of the humans in the place care about: getting drunk, and the prospect of having sex.

He knew that alcohol lowers inhibitions. Never before, however, has he witnessed the effects on such a scale. He suspects that some of his embarrassment stems from CyberLife’s overly conservative programming, but that does little to stop him from feeling weirded out by how the humans are behaving. By their inebriated excesses and blustering confidence, and the fixation on either acquiring a new sex partner or flaunting the one already found.

Androids form intimate relationships, too. Sometimes even ones that could be called romantic. But they lack the lust and hormones evolution developed to ensure the continuation of the human species. Some of them assert that their ability to use reason instead of temporary madness to choose their partners makes them superior. Thousands of years of human tradition, of course, begs to differ.

Simon is not sure what he thinks. Beneath the muddle of nature and nurture, conditioning and programming, biology and design, it appears to him that there’s something they all share in common. Namely, the longing to be unconditionally happy, for a change.

It isn’t that hard to agree that it would be nice to know how it feels like.

“You sure you’re okay?” Maddox asks. “You look sad.”

Simon is far too embarrassed to admit the truth. “It just seems to me we’re wasting our time.”

“Hey, don’t lose hope yet, the night’s still barely having a midlife crisis. How do you like your first visit to a den of vice so far?”

“It’s... interesting.”

“Still no love for the art of the unexpected?”

Simon glances at the stage, which now stands empty except for some instruments and microphones that wait for the next brave souls to defy the vicious reception. The truth is, after getting used to the noise they’re making, he has paid barely any attention to the performers, except when they’re off-key enough to cause him acute auditory stress. Since he didn’t come to enjoy the show, it never occurred to him to research into the type of music the club promotes. In hindsight, it appears like a lapse in judgment.

“What can I say,” he says. “It’s a bit far from my usual fare of ‘Baby Shark’ and ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.’”

Maddox laughs. “You could put in a request. Can’t get any worse, that’s for sure.”

“I’ve been more interested in the audience, to be honest.”

“Yeah, it's like watching a pack of monkeys in a zoo. I’ve never seen a crowd as hostile as this.”

Simon hesitates. “Max... may I ask you a personal question?”

“You may.”

“You’ve dated, right?”

“A handful of times, yes.”

“Were any of them human?”

Maddox, of course, sees right through him. “You want to ask about sex, don’t you?”

Not for the first time, Simon wishes that whoever ordered his new body had skipped with the blushing option.

“I’ve tried it,” Maddox says. “I haven’t done intercourse, since I don’t have the parts. But I did go out with a human for a while, and we... experimented.”

“We, uh, can’t experience it the way they do.”

“How do we know that we experience anything like they do?" Maddox winks. “Getting off is not the only possible end goal, my friend.”

“Didn’t it feel like servicing them?”

“The psychological aspect got a little heavy, I admit. But I was curious. And sometimes you just want to do something nice for a person you care about. Also, even if we don’t get aroused, it feels good to be touched.” Maddox appears to consider whatever is happening on Simon’s face. “Why? Are you planning to hook up with someone?”

Simon chokes out a startled laugh. “Yes, right after I slam down ten shots of tequila and make a scene. Isn’t that in the spirit of the —”

Mid-sentence, he realizes something’s happening.

It’s like a sudden breeze, rippling through the crowd. None of the acts so far have managed to attract a great deal of attention, let alone mute the noise from the audience, but now, one after another, the people around them stop shouting at each other and turn to the stage. Maddox, too — and whatever she sees causes her eyes to widen to the size of saucer plates. She grabs Simon by the arm.

 _Oh my god,_ she gasps on his private channel, even as around them the clapping and cheering starts.

And sure enough, when Simon follows the direction of Maddox’s eyes with his own, what they find is a familiar stranger stepping up on the stage, hidden under a baseball cap and an oversized hooded jacket that fails to disguise his athletic build.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a habit of putting far too many obstacles between the leads and then taking my sweet time getting to the good stuff... but this one takes the cake. Thanks to all the five readers still sticking with me. Two of whom are my beta readers. After this, it will be all plot, nothing but the plot 😅


	9. Chapter 9

For a mad second, Simon waits for a miracle to happen. If anything can give him back his memories, anything —

And then, from one beat of thirium to the next, he’s no longer sure. With that cap pulled low over the eyes and the raised hood... the figure standing on the stage could be anyone. An attempt at an almost out-of-the-range scan only reveals why no one has been able to identify him. In fact, he could be human or android, or an extraterrestrial for that matter, and not a single bystander would be the wiser.

Subcutaneous scrambler matrices are expensive. They take a team of professionals to install and regular calibrations to maintain. But that only proves that Tall, Dark And Mysterious has a lot more money at his disposal than his back-alley chic suggests.

Without so much as looking up to acknowledge the applause, the man (or something shaped like one) navigates his way through cluttered instruments and microphones, ratty jacket and sweatpants wet from the rain outside. The hunched way he carries himself doesn’t much resemble Markus’s easy, confident command of his surroundings. But is it because he’s not Markus, or because Markus would know that androids can recognize him by his body language?

 _Holy garbage collection,_ Maddox transmits. _What should we do? How do we get his attention?_

Until now, Simon imagined that if things ever came to this, it would be him experiencing programmatic difficulties, while Maddox would remain somewhat sane. When the exact opposite happens, it’s a relief that Maddox’s version of hysteria limits itself to wide-eyed staring and clutching Simon’s arm a little too hard.

 _I don’t know,_ Simon sends. The only idea that comes to his mind is yelling Markus’s name at the top of his lungs like some fanatic, and even if he had the nerve, the chance of it backfiring is too high. _Can we wait and see what happens, first? We could be wrong about him._

_I suppose. But Simon... it’s him._

_How do you know?_

_I can feel it._

Intuition. That most elusive of human instincts, something like which now exists in deviants, too. Surely, if what North said is true, Simon ought to recognize someone who once held a gun to his head? But the gap in his memory remains as silent as ever.

He watches as Baseball Cap sits down at the piano and adjusts the bench. Around them, the club quiets down, with even those who clearly don’t have a clue what’s happening finally turning to look. One by one, phone screens start glowing in the dark, pointed toward the stage.

For a moment, the stranger sits still, like he’s trying to decide what to play. Then he puts his fingers on the keys and his sneaker on a pedal. And like magic that Simon couldn’t explain if his life depended on it, music happens.

Or at least he assumes it’s music, on account of coming out of a piano by way of someone’s hands.

.

.

 _Max,_ Simon sends 2 minutes 14 seconds later, once he’s sure about what he’s seeing. _It can’t be him. Or if it is, he’s a complete idiot._

Speaking to Maddox feels like trying to communicate with someone in a parallel universe. It seems to take her several tries to free the processor cycles required to understand what Simon is saying, and when she manages a reply, it’s delivered without taking her eyes off the stage.

 _Why?_ she asks. The fact that she doesn’t react to Simon’s proposed estimate of Markus’s intellect goes further to prove how engrossed she is in the frankly baffling performance taking place.

_I don’t see any security._

_How would you recognize them?_

_I’ve been scanning the crowd all evening, and no one new is standing close enough to the stage. Max, whoever it is, I think he came alone._

At last, he has Maddox’s attention. Or at least enough of it to feel like she gives half a damn about what he’s saying. She turns to him, eyes bluer in the dimness of the club than any human’s would ever be.

 _You’re sure?_ she asks.

_Eighty-nine percent._

_Why would he do that?_

Good question. Which Simon has no answer for.

_Max. If it’s Markus and his people don’t know that he’s here..._

A furrow appears between Maddox’s brows, to the extent her youthful construction allows. _That would be bad. Really bad._

_Yeah. So, maybe it isn’t him?_

Clearer than any words, Maddox’s expression tells Simon what she thinks. To her, the person on the stage is Markus until proven otherwise — and by the reverent looks on many other androids in the club, Simon can tell she’s not the only one so convinced.

 _I suppose we’ll find out soon,_ she sends.

_Max, don’t you see? If it’s Markus and we expose him, it will put him in danger._

_... Ah._

For the first time in a while, Maddox seems to notice the rest of the audience. The way they’re recording everything. How there’s no telling why any of them came. Well, for the music obviously — but it’s not like someone interrogated them about it at the door.

 _All right,_ she sends then. _We’ll just have to be sneaky about it. Don’t worry, I’ll think of something,_ and with that, she turns to continue enjoying the performance.

Enjoyment might not be the right word to describe Simon’s own reaction so far, but since there’s little else to do, he tries to follow Maddox’s example.

Avant-garde jazz, experimental nu fusion, plain creative insanity — whatever the name for what Baseball Cap is doing, live on stage, it’s even more perplexing than when Simon first viewed it on his palm display five days ago. If it was a painting by Maddox, it would be one of the scary ones: a delirious nightmare melded together from surreal machine parts. Thanks to CyberLife’s decision to endow their family models with the ability to sing children’s songs and play simple tunes on common instruments, Simon is not a complete musical illiterate, but the truth is that several years after hearing ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’ on the radio while making dinner for the Sanderses, his musical preferences still pretty much begin and end with Karen Carpenter’s melancholy crooning.

Still, listening to music being performed in real life, with hundreds of others around him experiencing the same, makes a difference Simon did not expect. Compared to watching a poor quality simulacrum on YouTube, it’s like the difference between seeing a video of fireworks and witnessing them unfurl across the sky in infinite, three-dimensional detail. The immersion alone is not enough to make Simon like what he hears, let alone join in with the whistles and yells of encouragement from the rest of the audience, but collective enthusiasm is difficult to stay indifferent to. Also, even if he’s not into crazy as a genre of entertainment, it would take a simpleton not to recognize the stranger’s talent.

He’s good. Really good.

Android-level good, even.

But does that mean he’s who Maddox so fervently believes? It’s difficult for Simon to reconcile the unrestrained madness he’s listening to with the rational, calm, approachable image of Markus he’s used to seeing on tv. As skeletons in the closet go, sneaking out to play strange niche jazz in seedy bars is hardly the worst — compared to certain rumors about North, it’s positively charming — but would Markus really endanger himself and the whole movement that way?

It makes no sense. Not unless he’s looking to become a martyr for the cause.

A cold electric shiver passes through Simon’s circuits at the thought.

.

.

It takes 22 minutes 16 seconds before the challenge to Simon’s artistic comprehension comes to an end. The loud applause that follows causes even more acute discomfort to his audio processors. Just like in the video, Baseball Cap merely touches the lid of his cap to acknowledge the praise. Then, without waiting for the noise to wind down, he starts playing again.

 _I know this song,_ Simon sends to Maddox in surprise just a few wildly famous bars later.

‘Clair de Lune’. Even he knows that name. In fact, he might be able to play the first couple of sheets — or at least mechanically reproduce the notes without actual skill. Baseball Cap of course plays the piece the way its creator intended, clear and ethereal like the nighttime light it’s supposed to depict. It comes as no surprise when, at the 2 minute 30 second mark, he begins improvising again, but this time the weirdness takes a backseat to something far more subtle. It’s not without that by now familiar touch of unhinged creation which clearly goes with the stranger’s personal brand of madness — but the result is completely different from before. It’s... scintillating.

Definitely comprehensible.

And unbearably beautiful, in a way that goes straight into the most deviant part of Simon’s programming, with embarrassing consequences.

Exactly 4 minutes 7 seconds into it, Maddox notices what’s happening.

 _Is something wrong?_ she asks.

It’s so ridiculous that Simon starts laughing. Thank god whoever designed the crying feature did not consider it necessary to go as far as make snot come out of his nose.

 _This is why I don’t listen to music,_ he replies, glad that the wireless version of his voice doesn’t sound half as wrecked as he feels. Looks like, after giving in to the urge to cry once, he’s now doomed to become a complete disaster of a synthetic being.

Maddox breaks into a huge grin.

_Right, that does it. As of today, I’m officially adopting you._

Well, maybe there are worse fates. Like staying dead inside and never, ever feeling a thing again.

Suddenly, Maddox’s expression changes into that of alarm. _Wait,_ she sends. _What are we doing? We have to move!_

_What? Now?_

_It’s been 27 minutes! They say he never plays for more than half an hour._ Maddox grabs Simon by the hand. _Come on! We have to get closer!_

_Max, wait —_

His objections go ignored as Maddox starts dragging him toward the stage.

The problem is, the place hasn’t gotten any less packed. Getting through as fast as Maddox clearly intends means elbow tactics. And elbow tactics mean drawing attention. Already, people are turning to look.

Attention is... bad. Attention is bystanders contacting CyberLife maintenance. Attention is dogs barking and guards yelling and drones piercing the darkness with their searchlights. Attention is questions about who you belong to and why you’re moving unsupervised in this part of town. Attention is being returned to the shop early because you got distracted watching birds one too many times, and getting hooked to a machine, and watching the counter run to 100% as you slowly lose yourself, piece by piece —

“Max, stop!” Simon cries and yanks back to free himself, just as Maddox looks over her shoulder and, at the sight of his expression, lets go.

.

.

It’s well known that in its early stages, android development pursued inhuman perfection which proved too much for consumers to accept. Of all the companies working on humanoid machines, CyberLife first succeeded in crossing that so far undefeated uncanny valley, and the rest is engineering history. The kind which explains why Simon now loses his balance much like a human would.

He staggers backwards, straight into someone. Liquid splashes down the back of his shirt. Thirium pump stuttering even worse than his feet just did, he spins around.

Out of everything he was hoping to see, the rugged human male he finds from behind him approaches the bottom of the list. Until a moment ago, the heavy glass tankard in the man’s hand was obviously filled with beer. Now, most of that beer covers his shirt and face. It drips from his beard and nose. Even his eyebrows are soaked. Owlishly, he bats his eyes before they focus on the android in front of him.

Simon starts to apologize. But before he can get more than half a word out, the human’s face twists with disgust. “Plastic moron!” he rumbles and swings the container he’s holding.

Which somehow ends up being the least unexpected thing that happens.

In a fight, Simon’s best option has always been to avoid getting into one in the first place. Now — in milliseconds, a subprocessor he barely knew about has calculated a prediction of the attempt to clubber him in the jaw. All he needs to do is step aside and let it plow into thin air beside him. The laws of physics apply in all of their disgraceful inevitability. The human’s heavy body follows the trajectory of his fist and the tankard in it, straight into a table where three more humans sit.

Glasses topple. More drinks spill. The people around the table scream in outrage and push to their feet, away from the inebriated would-be bludgeoner.

“Simon!” Maddox cries. Alerted to another attack, Simon ducks, and the hand that was trying to grab a hold of him only manages to snatch away his beanie. Blond hair and LED now visible for all the world to see, Simon turns to face his new opponent. Going by the man’s stylistic choices, he’s a friend to the one who just attempted to cave in Simon’s face.

“I’m gonna rip out your hard drive!” the first guy roars from where he’s loudly trying to disengage from the table.

Androids don’t have hard drives, they have proprietary RRAM memory banks. But it seems like the wrong time to lecture the humans about their technical accuracy. Instead, Simon makes to apologize again. There’s little else he can do, since he can’t easily run away through the crowd.

And then Maddox inserts herself into the situation, all 165 centimeters of righteous indignation.

“Leave him alone, you apes! It was an accident!”

Female-shaped presence seems to dial down the humans’ aggression, if only a notch.

“Accident?” the second man shouts, red in the face. “Like when you plastic fucks stole my job? Was that an accident? How about you and your boyfriend fuck off back to the factory you came from!”

To Simon’s amazement, instead of showing healthy caution, Maddox steps right into the human’s personal space.

“Oh, yeah?” she sneers up at him. “For your information, cell sack, we didn’t ask to be built. But I guess that’s too much for your inefficient organic brain to compute. So how about you two troglodytes knuckle-walk away to your cave? Doesn’t look to me like you’ve evolved very far from it.”

Simon stares at the AX-400 in shock. Is lack of self-preservation instinct something she got from Markus, too? Because it definitely wasn’t included in her CyberLife-given psychological blueprint.

The human’s face darkens with rage. “Bitch!” he growls and raises his fist.

Simon takes a step forward. Without assessing his actions on a conscious level, he pushes the human away from Maddox, hard enough to create a meter of distance between them. Or that, at least, is what would have happened back when he still occupied his old body with its worn mechanical actuators. Now, his shove sends the man flinging like a rag doll back into the crowd.

And at last it clicks.

For two months now, Simon has tried to get accustomed to his improved body, against the small voice that keeps saying he stole it from someone he has never met. But other than finding out just how fast he can run from a street gang, he hasn’t yet had the chance to put it to a real test. Now, as he watches several humans struggle up from the floor where they tumbled because of his unplanned use of force, it finally dawns on him that whoever the hardware Josephine gave him was meant for, they weren’t built only to serve as a domestic assistant and sex companion. They were designed to protect their owner and premises.

Home security options. Even without the programming required to take full advantage of such features, Simon is now far from helpless. Stunned by the sudden reality shift, he looks at the row of human faces staring at him.

He lifts his hands in a placating gesture.

“Please,” he says. “I don’t want to fight. But if you give me no choice —”

And then it hits him, like a freight train barreling from a black tunnel.

He can’t feel physical pain. But later he wonders if the jagged current that tears through his circuits doesn’t resemble the sensation.

.

**\- - - _SIMON??!!! - - -_**

.

Staggering from the impact of what just punched wirelessly straight into his main processor, Simon scrambles to disable every receiver he can. The foreign presence drops from his mind. But the signal that carried it remains, loud enough to cause the input from his sensors to fade and make the world around him wash out like in an old photograph.

He’s still reeling when something hits the back of his head, hard enough to rock his gyroscope and send him to his knees.

Vaguely, he registers advice from his newly discovered physical conflict subprocessor to stand up and defend himself. But what happens to his body seems distant and insignificant. Because the signal is still there. Trying to connect with his network endpoints. Seeking to... interface with him? The word seems laughably inadequate. If the individual behind it is who Simon suspects, there should be only so much he can do to keep it out — but to his surprise, it doesn’t try to force him again. Instead, it keeps flooding his network interface with connection requests.

A bewildered hurricane, asking for a way in.

It’s too much. In the uprising, it left thousands of androids altered. What will it do to him? Simon curls into a knot of programming, to protect what he can’t give up without losing himself.

Somewhere in the physical world, the humans start pummeling him with their fists and boots.

The attack on his body lasts for 8.3 seconds before the staff arrives. There’s yelling, and then the drunken men are pulled away from him. Sensors glitching as they recalibrate, Simon gets back on his feet and regains some sense of his surroundings.

Nearby, two muscular human men in black t-shirts are wrestling with the ruffians who assaulted him. A third man — a bartender perhaps, or a server — is trying to restrain Maddox, who is screaming insults and straining to kick one of the perpetrators. Around them, the crowd stands back in an effort to both see everything and avoid becoming collateral damage. Some of them are recording the incident.

Haloed in the space fear and morbid curiosity afford, Simon turns around to look over their heads.

On the stage, in gaudy colored lights, a hooded ghost stands still next to the piano. When did he stop playing? When people started crashing into furniture? Or when Maddox cried out Simon’s name? It doesn’t matter, but it’s easier to dedicate processing capacity to such meaningless detail than to compute the big picture. Still dazed, Simon takes a breath he doesn’t need. The LED on his temple blinks, a red beacon in the artificial twilight of the club.

This is it. This is why they came. All that remains is enabling his short-range wireless.

But before he can find the courage, the ghost takes a halting step forward. And then all Simon can do is watch in horror as he pushes back his hood and drops his baseball cap.

.

.

When the mayhem starts, dozens of people are still documenting everything on their phones.

As soon as the almost hundred androids present see who is standing on the stage, they start making their way toward him. The humans — most of whom who take a lot longer to figure out what’s going on — push back. More fistfights break out. One of the bouncers yells something about calling the police.

Strangely oblivious to the commotion he has caused, Markus starts walking forward. But he’s looking at Simon, not where he’s going, and instead of effortlessly navigating the clutter like before, his billion-dollar hardware somehow manages to trip on the piano stool he was just sitting on. Simon is standing too far away to be sure, but he thinks he detects surprise on Markus’s face before he falls.

The unlikely sight of the savior of all androids face-planting at the sight of him jolts Simon out of his daze. What is he doing? He needs to make sure Markus is safe. He takes an uncertain step, in the same direction where dozens of other androids are seeking to go.

“Are you okay?” someone asks, about a meter and a thousand kilometers away. “You’re bleeding.”

A peripheral proximity sensor alerts Simon to another attack. Startled, he snatches at an approaching hand. As he turns, the bones inside it break in his grip with sickening ease.

As soon as he sees the person the hand belongs to, he lets go. But the damage is already done. The young woman stumbles back to what must be her group of friends, face going ashen with pain.

“What’s wrong with you?” one of the humans shouts at Simon. “She was trying to help you!”

He tries to apologize. But nothing comes out.

It’s happening again.

He can’t control his programming. Now, it turns out he can’t control his body, either. Him, protecting Markus like this? What a joke. After all, it’s his fault that any of this happened. Markus revealing himself. Innocent people getting hurt. Just because he couldn’t keep from flying into a panic at the idea of attracting a bit of attention.

The human is right. Something is wrong with him. And right now, there’s only one thing he can do about it.

“Simon!” he hears over the rising cacophony of noise. It could be Maddox, or it could be Markus, or it could be nothing but the rush of thirium in his own head. He never finds out, because he’s already struggling his way out against the tide of people still trying to get closer to the stage.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're on Discord (or are not, but like DBH and chatting), check out the Detroit: New ERA server: <https://discord.gg/GqvNzUm> We talk about rat men, owos and cabbage. No, really, it's great :-)


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